Serving Vulnerable And Marginalized Populations In Social And Educational Contexts

There is evidence that the global COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating existing inequalities and marginalization of vulnerable groups, including exceptional learners, stateless, street, migrant, and refugee children and youths, and the limited use of frameworks of emergency planning with and for marginalized and at-risk individuals. These challenges are multi-sectoral and intersecting, and they require multi- and interdisciplinary interventions to inform inclusive responses. These issues include being at a greater risk of excluding vulnerable learners from gaining access to equitable education (online/remote and blended education). Intersecting forms of discrimination such as gender, socioeconomic and legal status further exacerbate the problem. This has alerted us to examine the living conditions of marginalized and vulnerable populations around the globe, and to reveal their experiences, problems, and needs from an educational perspective, thus bringing insights into their vulnerabilities during the pandemic.

In this edited collection, academics, heath care professionals, and policy-makers examine the historical, political, and social factors that influence the health and health care of Indigenous, inner-city, and migrant populations in Canada. This crucial text broadens traditional determinants of health—social, economic, environmental, and behavioural elements—to include factors like family and community, government policies, mental health and addiction, disease, homelessness and housing, racism, youth, and LGBTQ that heavily influence these under-served populations. With contributions from leading scholars including Dennis Raphael, this book addresses the need for systemic change both in and outside of the Canadian health care system and will engage students in health studies, nursing, and social work in crucial topics like health promotion, social inequality, and community health.

This contributed volume offers a holistic understanding of social work practice in deprived communities through its thematization of understanding deprived communities globally, the development of competencies for social work practice in and with deprived communities, social work education as a community development tool, and the empowerment of social workers in deprived communities. Inequality as a globally recognized challenge is extensively elaborated within the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Global Agenda program for social work, making this a timely and important contribution to the literature. Deprived communities, used in this book to mean slums, ghettos, favelas, and low-income, remote, underserved, vulnerable, impoverished, underdeveloped, disadvantaged, or less-favoured communities, exist worldwide and are conceptualized under different terms and concepts. For that reason, social work, specifically in deprived areas, is not sufficiently recognized as a specific field of practice within community work. As a result, this volume features contributions that: provide a conceptual clarification of many different terms that are used for describing deprived communities and offer a systematic literature review on community processes and effects on well-being in underdeveloped communities; map different fields of social work involvement in deprived communities with concrete practice examples; and, stress why social work as a profession needs support and how it can be empowered to improve its capacities in deprived communities. With international authorship and perspectives on social work approaches for deprived communities from India, Sub-Saharan Africa, North and Central Europe, and North America, Practicing Social Work in Deprived Communities is an essential resource for social workers, social work educators, and community development practitioners. The text also should be of interest to students of social work, as well as other professionals and researchers working within community development and deprived communities.

This book advocates for community-based research with vulnerable populations within the field of higher education. The chapters outline how research can democratize knowledge generation to make it more accessible and socially relevant, and emphasizes the value of the lived and experiential knowledge of vulnerable and marginalized populations. Rooted in a critique of the current practices of higher education that fail to support participatory and transformative research, the research is structured at micro, macro and meso levels to ultimately emancipate colonized thinking of stakeholders about power, privilege and participation. Focusing primarily on various contexts within the Global South, the contributors argue that the time is ripe for community-based research which combines the theoretical knowledge of the academy with the local, experiential knowledge of those experiencing the consequences of social inequality to co-construct knowledge for change.

This handbook addresses the issues and challenges of the delivery of social work education in the contemporary world. It provides an authoritative overview of the key debates, switching the lens away from a Western-centric focus to engage with a much broader audience in countries that are in the process of modernization and professionalization, alongside those where social work education is more developed. Chapters tackle major challenges with respect to curriculum, teaching, practice, and training in light of globalization, providing a thorough examination of the practice of social work in diverse contexts. This handbook presents a contribution to the process of knowledge exchange which is essential to global social work education. It brings together professional knowledge and lived experience, both universal and local, and aims to be an essential reference for social work educators, researchers, and students.

Mental health practitioners often overlook initial stabilization strategies and interventions when providing evidence-informed approaches in order to get to the so-called “important” or “interesting” part of treatment. For many mental health practitioners, the “important” or “interesting” component of treatment includes insight and therapeutic processing work. Some mental health practitioners are not implementing vital stabilization strategies before entering the so-called deeper components of therapeutic interventions. Proponents of a stabilization approach maintain that a level of stabilization, prior to therapeutic insight or processing-based interventions, increases the likelihood of an individual benefiting from therapeutic processing, exposure, and insight-based work. Further, individuals who have achieved a level of stabilization prior to therapeutic insight or processing-based interventions have been identified as being less likely to drop out of treatment. Stabilization Approaches That Empower Clients Through Mental Health Crises is a critical reference source that educates mental health practitioners in a range of trauma-informed approaches and resources that promote stabilization, provides a guide for the practical application of stabilization-based therapy, and offers insights into stabilization as it is applied across a variety of therapeutic approaches. Providing readers with explanations of key concepts, strategies to overcome barriers in the safe application of a range of therapeutic techniques, and resources that can be used across a variety of treatment settings and clinical diagnoses, this book is ideal for psychiatrists, counselors, psychologists, clinical social workers, mental health professionals, researchers, academicians, and students who seek to provide a safer therapeutic intervention when providing evidence-informed mental health care.

This edited collection is about poverty, social exclusion and vulnerability in educational contexts at a time of rising inequality when policy research suggests that such issues are being ignored or distorted within neoliberal logics. It opens innovative areas of thinking by exploring different explanations and approaches to school change.