Homemade Social Work: Starting In The Ontological

Abstract

"Ontological" sounds like one of those esoteric and abstract concepts so annoying to those embedded in the "real" world of practice. Ontological questions relate to matters of actual existence and action. In this paper I argue that starting in the ontological or lived experience has been a central thread of social work since the time of pioneering social worker Jane Addams. Her work documenting an interpretive praxis offers an anchoring for the continuous renewal of social work. This paper aims to link the past to the present and further to identify the ontological power of ethnographic methods in continuing these "homemade" traditions. Beginning with a reflection on my practice and subsequent research, the paper considers six interpretive projects I supervised. A common thread is their contextual generation in the lived experience of the always-embodied researcher/practitioner. Setting aside the epistemological debate around qualitative, compared with quantitative, approaches, this paper examines what interpretive research does and explores the power of ethnographic methods in social work research and practice. Seven contemporary interpretive research cases map how located experiences of gender, indigeneity, practitioner-being, migration and other possibilities usefully inform the project of social work. All share generation from a particular practitioner's "local knowledge" and in that sense are "homemade". All differ by virtue of being responsive to each researcher's positioning in time and place. Homemade social work is a way of doing social work research. This way of making knowledge through exploring, demonstrating and publishing responsiveness to the diversity of problematic issues in an always-changing world has the advantage of turning reflected practitioner experience into an asset for a researcher rather than being considered a contaminating deficit. Such theoretically informed projects constitute ways for social work as a discipline and profession to rise to the challenge of being research-informed while building on what it is that social work practitioners do.