Social Work and the Visual Imagination

<p>Images are inscribed in the memory more easily than words, and some remain with the viewer for a lifetime. Combining hindsight, insight and foresight, the chapters in this book turn a spotlight onto various aspects of health, social work and socially engaged arts practice. The visual imagination is evoked in this book to help practitioners see beneath the surface of contentious and problematic issues facing human services today. Risk assessment, child sexual abuse, work-life balance, old age, dementia, substance misuse, recovery, sex work, homelessness, isolation, biography, death and dying, grief, loss, vulnerability, care, and the function of the museum as a preserver of memory, all come under the sustained gaze and examination of the contributors. Grounded in the arts and humanities, the visual sense as a gateway to empathy is explored throughout these chapters. References are included to visual art, curating dramatic performance, poetry, film, dance, photography, diary entries, and public exhibitions. In an age when people increasingly compose their lives by staring into various screens, this book celebrates the visual modality that can humanise services with ‘human-seeings’. </p><p></p><p>This book was originally published as a special issue of the <i>Journal of Social Work Practice</i>.</p> <p>Introduction 1. Looking into the seeds of time. Visual imagery in <i>Macbeth </i>and its relevance to social work practice, supervision and research. <i>Martin Smith</i> 2.<i> </i>Visual imagination, reflexivity and the power of poetry: inquiring into work-life balance<i> Louise Grison</i>i 3.<i> </i>Imagining transitions in old age through the visual matrix method: thinking about what is hard to bear <i>Anne Liveng, Ellen Ramvi, Lynn Froggett, Julian Manley, Wendy Hollway, Ase Lading and Britta H.Gripsrud </i>4. Re-imagining dementia using the visual matrix <i>Carrie Clarke </i>5.<i> </i>Recovery and movement: allegory and ‘journey’ as a means of exploring recovery from substance misuse <i>Alastair Roy and Julian Manley </i>6. Walking with Faye from a direct access hostel to her special place in the city: walking, body and image space. <i>Maggie O’Neill and Catrina McHugh.</i> 7. The cold truth: art as fulcrum for recovery in participants and for civic change <i>Eloise Malone </i>8<i>.</i>Creative relations <i>William Titley. </i>9. Deleuze, art and social work <i>Lita Crociani-Windland</i>10.<i> </i>Accounting for the museum<i> Myna Trustram</i></p>