Full Description
This book sheds light on the interactional and institutional processes through which child welfare and child protection practices are delivered to fifteen Dutch and fifteen Dutch-Curacaoan single-mother families with multiple problems in the Netherlands in order to assess structures of power, dominance and oppression. It is important to 'Disentangle an invisible trade', because state intervention practices remain largely 'invisible' from the public gaze.The author draws on a thirty-month ethnographic study, undertaken with the single-mother families between 2009 and 2012, in order to demonstrate how state interventions are carried out in these families. Using the empirically grounded theory of Agar (1985) on institutional discourse, the book addresses the question of how state interventions are shaped by institutional discourse and power asymmetries in encounters between single-mother families with multiple problems and state representatives.The different chapters of the book aim to unravel the 'invisible trade'phenomena step-by-step, descending from the macro-level via the meso and micro- to the ego-level.It does so through the combined ethnographic critical discourse analytical framework, which the author has developed for the analysis of empirical data upon which the chapters are drawn. All four levels together make transparent how institutional discourse is (re)produced and constituted within sites of a larger system, which is influenced by power asymmetries.
Contents
Chapter 1 An introduction to state interventions in single-mother families; Chapter 2 Upon whom are we focusing? Defining a 'multi-problem family' in theory and the consequences for social workers in practice; Chapter 3 Caught in the Child Protection System: the impact of institutional diagnosis for Dutch and Dutch-Curacaoan single-mother families in the Netherlands; Chapter 4 In whose interest? An analysis of exemplary interaction between a family supervisor and a Dutch-Curacaoan single mother; Chapter 5 'Dancing in Dry Rain': ethics during situated fieldwork in single-mother child protection families; Chapter 6 Disentangling an invisible trade: state intervention in Dutch and Dutch-Curacaoan single-mother families in the Netherlands.
