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An appreciative inquiry process was collaboratively undertaken with an inner city local authority and personal advisors where systemic social work practice was embedded. The purpose of this study is to explore how systemic social work principles could be integrated into the support of young adults leaving the care system, especially when safeguarding concerns exist.

Three fortnightly, reflecting team-style, appreciative inquiry workshops explored the integration into practice of systemic concepts under the themes of safeguarding, uncertainty and new possibilities.

Within the contexts of the organisation, other agencies and the relationship, six paired themes emerged: learning and navigating; positioning and risk-taking; and feeling and engaging. Core systemic concepts, such as self-reflexivity and mutual influence, can enable personal advisers to use themselves and their relationship with care leavers as a context for change. Considering responses to risk from different family member positions may support holding greater levels of uncertainty. Seeing resilience as a process rather than a personal attribute enabled personal advisors to think about how they connected with care leavers through shared life experiences, fostering narratives of hopes and dreams where new possibilities abound.

Appreciative inquiry is generally seen as a defined model for implementing large organisational changes; this study comprised a small sample group, and the model’s application was less defined.

A gap exists in the extensive care leaver research, addressing safeguarding and working systemically. A conceptual model for practice is offered, with potential utility in developing further systemically informed training and supervision for practitioners. A less structured and more relationally engaged model for appreciative inquiry is presented.

This paper aims to develop a heuristic ethical stance as a provocation for responsible leadership scholarship and practice within entangled human–environment systems. Through consideration of the failures of ethics – in particular Uyghur mass atrocities and their residues in global supply chains – the stance offers a reflexive pathway between the inner value orientation of leaders and the scope of interconnected interests affected by leader action and inaction.

Through an autoethnographic narrative, the applied ethic brings together work by the contemporary Holocaust philosopher John Roth with a motto spread by Anglican educational philosopher and social entrepreneur Charlotte Mason (1842–1923). The failures of ethics centre material, sensorial, religious and relational tensions that are explored through three conversational vignettes relating to the current mass atrocities of Uyghur Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China.

The resulting ethical stance relates individual personhood to meso and macro levels through Mason’s motto –I am, I can, I ought, I will –and is developed to contain self-reflexivity and identity, conscience informed by testimony, consciousness of the power to protest and resist and intention to pivot. The failures of ethics highlight the apparent centrality of religious ethical traditions to considerations of responsible leadership.

The lack of serious and sustained attention to the ethics in responsible leadership, in particular ethical failures and religious ethics, limits its relevance within entangled systems The paper brings to responsible leadership novel philosophical perspectives to link reflexivity between individual and governance level responses and enliven the imagination of conscience through the ubiquity of complicity.

This discursive paper considers the use of restrictive practices in mental health inpatient settings and how these are often prioritised over relational approaches, especially where the diagnostic label of personality disorder intersects with risk.

Key concepts from Orwell’s 1984 are studied for their pertinence to mental health inpatient settings, supporting our argument that restrictive practices arise from dichotomous thinking and externalised fears.

Drawing upon Orwellian themes of power, social control and digital surveillance from 1984, the authors highlight the role of fear in perpetuating restrictive practices under a guise of benevolent care in mental health inpatient settings, especially for those who are diagnosed with a personality disorder. A lack of preparedness to work with complexity in such environments, coupled with a deficit in self-reflexivity and critical thinking, can exacerbate challenges.

To transcend damaging dichotomies and reduce restrictive practices in inpatient settings, the authors make the argument for the adequate preparation and education of the mental health nurse and authentic, collaborative, user-involved care.

The authors use Orwell’s novel to support a critical discourse around those damaging dichotomies and inherent contradictions that contribute to restrictive practice in contemporary mental health settings and to question whose interests’ these restrictive practices serve.

This study aims to examine how critical love theory is operationalized in K-12 classrooms to support Black children. The authors use BlackCrit and a conceptual framework of critical love to describe the strategies educators used as pro-Black pedagogies of resistance.

The authors conducted a thematic analysis to identify how critical love praxis is used by K-12 educators as a tool to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism as defined by the framings of BlackCrit theory. The authors produced a literature synthesis of qualitative research that responds to this study’s research questions: How are critical love theories operationalized? What educator practices do researchers identify as material manifestations of critical love?; and How and to what extent do critical love praxis address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistorical approaches to social transformation as defined by BlackCrit theory?

Critical love theories manifest as critical love praxis. Educators used critical love praxis to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism by cultivating and supporting the co-creation of homeplace for Black students in K-12 education. Homeplace is cultivated through critical love praxis as classroom-focused, person-focused and politically focused approaches.

This study’s findings extend current theoretical research on critical love by describing its material form in K-12 education and by identifying how a critical love praxis can work to directly challenge anti-Blackness. The authors find implications for their work in teacher education and teachers’ in-service professional development.

This chapter reflects upon a distinct decolonisation journey taking place in Wales, and how a Welsh government organisation called diversity anti-racist practice and professional learning (DARPL) is contributing to changing the Welsh educational landscape through decolonial praxis. We describe how a research collective of Welsh Initial Teacher Educators worked on decolonising their professional practice, curricula, and their own minds. This research runs parallel to curriculum changes in Wales that are part of a broad suite of Welsh government policies and commitments based on anti-racist thinking and professional learning in education. DARPL, which is funded by the Welsh government and housed within Cardiff Metropolitan University (CMU), is a community of practice working with a wide range of partners and networks across Wales. DARPL operates via a ‘virtual campus’, delivering in-person and online training, delivered by staff with lived and professional experience of racism. It provides a national model of professional learning for those working across all tiers of education to develop an understanding of anti-racist practice and leadership.

This chapter considers how phenomenology and ethnography can be combined as an interpretive strategy for studying mobile media practices in everyday life. We argue that haptic methodologies in mobile media research generate an overflow of data that are often difficult to capture in written form. The dilemma of data excess is discussed in the context of a 4-year research project on gendered mobile media practices, exploring how mobile devices are often intertwined with the experience of bodily safety in urban environments. Our primary aim was to investigate the relationship between networked connectivity, mobile media and perceptions of risk in terms of bodily experience, including affective or emotional feelings. This chapter focuses on the haptic methods and techniques used during home visits with participants and the various ways that the volume and density of data are subsequently thinned out to become manageable and publishable. We first situate our research within haptic and mobile media studies, followed by an explanation of phenomenology and how it can be used to inform ethnographic methods in ways that are particularly useful for researching haptic media practices. This chapter then provides some examples of how the data are always in excess, an overflow resulting from the variability and individuality of participant experience and the difficulty of describing and accounting for personal histories and feelings. Finally, we show how the data can be strategically ‘contained’ in the process of writing for the purposes of publication, thematic framing and knowledge translation.

Despite being conjointly stronger in their synergies in the past, there is still a significant gap between management and organization studies and sociology. The temporal lag is also, on occasion, a substantive lag. The emergent sociological concept of emotional reflexivity has recently been used in organizational studies. The question that animates this contribution concerns the nature of this translation, reception, and extension; thus, we ask how organization studies have been using the sociological concept of emotional reflexivity? We will examine recent seminal sociological studies on emotional reflexivity to answer this inquiry and consider some organizational studies citing these. We describe the reception of sociological ideas of emotional reflexivity in management and organization studies literature. By analyzing the differences and disconnections produced within this discourse, it will be possible to understand that emotional reflexivity is rarely addressed in emotional encounters between people and other modes of being in modern organizations. We introduce narrative fiction as a method; the narrative focuses on the relationships between humans and other beings in the workplace dynamics of a vocational school. The story tells how Charlie, a deaf student, changed his life after entering the vocational school and becoming involved with different pedagogical teaching-learning strategies. Adopting two deaf dogs, which had both suffered from past unsuccessful adoption experiences, produced life-enhancing emotional reflexivity. We conclude with a research agenda scoping further directions.

Achieving basic education and equitable education outcomes remains a challenge, therefore, improving equity in education has evolved as a particularly important policy priority in all OECD countries. This chapter concentrates on equity in the Maltese education system, with a particular focus on how the policyscape makes provision for achieving, improving, and maintaining equity in compulsory schooling. As an EU member state, Malta has been affected by the evolution, causes, and consequences of social, educational, and economic inequalities that have been an ardently contentious and controversial issue given the recent economic crisis in Europe. This chapter utilizes Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach to analyse national school inclusion policy in Malta as illustrative of policies mobilized to address the problem of inequality, therefore acknowledging the need for a provision of equity as a major agenda. The results of this small-scale study have theoretical and methodological implications for academics, policymakers, and practitioners in the educational policy field. This study highlights the fact that there are a number of persistent challenges for achieving equity in education, especially the immigrant-native educational gap, despite European policy makers having been very active in the educational field.