Suchergebnisse

Most social policy texts make only marginal, if any, reference to racism in the welfare state, or the experiences and struggles of Black people. Welf are theory likewise has failed to take account of major theoretical work on 'race' and class. Full acknowledgement of these issues is not only essential to any pro gressive welfare strategy but also poses major challenges to existing welfare thinking. These challenges are explored here and a tentative framework of analysis is offered for understanding the historical and contemporary relationship between "race', racism and the welfare state.

Research-led teaching is the sine qua non of the 21stcentury university. To understand its possibilities for teaching and learning about race in Social Policy requires, as a first step, interrogating the epistemological and theoretical core of the discipline, as well as its organisational dynamics. Using parts of Emirbayer and Desmond's (2012) framework of disciplinary reflexivity, this article traces the discipline's habits of thought but also its lacunae in the production of racial knowledge. This entails focusing on its different forms of institutionalised and epistemological whiteness, and what has shaped the omission or marginalisation of a full understanding of the racialisation of welfare subjects and regimes in the discipline. Throughout, the article offers alternative analyses and thinking that fully embrace the historical and contemporary role of race, racism, and nation in lived realities, institutional processes, and global racial orders. It concludes with pointers towards a re-envisioning of Social Policy, within a framework in which postcolonial and intersectional theory and praxis are championed. Only then might a decolonised curriculum be possible in which race is not peripheral to core teaching and learning.

The papers in the themed section emerge from the work of the ESRC Research Group on Care, Values and the Future of Welfare (CAVA), based at the University of Leeds. CAVA was funded from 1999 to undertake a five-year programme of research into changes in parenting and partnering in Britain and their implications for future social policies. At the heart of CAVA's research is an investigation into the values that people attach to their parenting and partnering activities. We are interested in 'what matters' to people in their family lives and personal relationships, especially as they undergo change. This question lay at the centre of our core empirical projects, all of which were based on in-depth qualitative research. (An account of our methodology may be found in the Appendix to this Introduction). The projects focused on different aspects of change: motherhood, care and employment; kin relationships after divorce; care and commitments in transnational families; practices of care and intimacy amongst those who live without a co-resident partner; and collective values of care and support in self-help groups, voluntary organisations and trade unions. Each of these projects is represented in the following collection.