Complex Pathways
The Ethics of Self-care in Social Work: Student Beliefs and Barriers
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jessica Gladden
Students who will be going into helping professions, such as social work and counseling, have an ethical mandate through their Code of Ethics to engage in self-care activities in order to be effective in their workplace. This study integrates multiple research projects that explore what students believe regarding various self-care practices, along with research conducted on barriers some student populations may have relating to their self-care. Methods of reducing these barriers are discussed. Classroom activities that encourage students to engage in self-care to reduce secondary traumatic stress are also reviewed.
Gendered Nationalism and Migrant (M)othering of Multicultural Family Services in South Korea : Migrants’ (M)othering Under a Neoliberal Gaze to Promote the Korean Nationalism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eunjung Lee
To address significant care deficits and the lowest birth rate in the world, foreign brides have been actively recruited and subsequently a series of state-initiated/nation-wide policies and services for marriage migrants and their families were implemented. Scholars criticize this Korean multicultural policy (that locates marriage migrants as reproductive labor force and their children as social capitals) as sexist, patriarchal, and pro-nationalistic. This study illustrates how the multicultural services devised to support marriage migrants, and their families reify cultural paternalism and xenoracism while inferiorizing their mothering practice and even legitimize the state surveillance in everyday institutional practice. Using ethnographic research as a method, one Multicultural Family Support Center was recruited as a field site in Seoul, Korea. After receiving Ethics approval, ten service providers, five marriage migrants, and a government officer participated in the study (N=16), along with various field observations of the research site and its programs. The findings illustrated through multiple forms in service delivery (e.g., service pledge forms and absence reports) and numerous scientific tests for program outcome measures, the surveillance of and intrusion into migrant mothers’ parenting were legitimized while promoting gendered intensive parenting as an unmarked norm; However, no frontline workers raised any concerns about some of the required tests that problematized multicultural children as ‘disabled’ or ‘inferior.’ Also, the intensification of multicultural children’s language education that was presented as cultivating and augmenting children’s development under the name of the national good, continued to maintain cultural hierarchy and marginalization between natives and migrants.
