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Child welfare social work is emotive and demanding work, requiring highly skilled and resilient practitioners. In a context of austerity, increased public scrutiny and accountability, defensive practice has been identified as a feature of professional practice. However, little is known about the processes through which social workers develop resilience or come to adopt a defensive stance in managing the demands of their work. This article focuses on professional storytelling among child welfare social workers. It examines how social workers construct their professional role through team talk and the implications of this for our understanding of professional resilience and defensiveness. Drawing on an in-depth narrative analysis of focus groups with social work teams, eight story types are identified in social workers' talk about their work: emotional container stories, solidarity stories, professional epiphanies, professional affirmation stories, partnership stories, parables of persistence, tales of courageous practice and cautionary tales. Each story type foregrounds a particular aspect of child welfare practice, containing a moral about social work with vulnerable children and families. The article concludes with the implications of these stories for our understanding of both resilience and the pull towards defensiveness in child welfare social work.

AbstractThis article conceptualises the role of emotion in social work home visits. It draws on findings from a qualitative study of initial child protection home visits in the United Kingdom. The research used narrative interviews and focus groups to examine how emotions arising from visits were registered in social workers' narratives. These visits were often challenging; social workers needed to manage their own emotions and those of the family, while at the same time investigating concerns and assessing need. This article identifies seven key emotional experiences associated with the home visit from the perspective of the social worker: going into the unknown; being intrusive; being disliked; fear of harm to self; fear of causing or allowing harm; pain, disgust, and distress; and "absorbing" emotion. It is argued that emotion plays a central role in home visiting and that professionals' emotional responses have important implications for the way they make sense of, and manage, home visits. Emotion is therefore conceptualized as both a potential resource and risk for social workers' professional judgement and practice.

A key development in Wittgenstein Studies over recent years has been the advancement of a resolutely therapeutic reading of the Tractatus . Rupert Read offers the first extended application of this reading of Wittgenstein, encompassing Wittgenstein's later work too, to examine the implications of Wittgenstein's work as a whole upon the domains especially of literature, psychopathology, and time. Read begins by applying Wittgenstein's remarks on meaning to language, examining the consequences our conception of philosophy has for the ways in which we talk about meaning. He go