Social Work Spotlight - Episode 36: Ben

Episode Date: August 6, 2021

In this episode, I speak with Ben, a Ph.D. candidate at Western Sydney University with a social work practice background in community mental health, group work with men and boys, and community development (with the Penrith Panthers Rugby League Club). He is the founder of two social work-focused podcasts (Social Work Stories and Social Work Discoveries), and has been tutoring across various social work subjects for the Masters and Bachelors of Social Work at WSU since 2017. He has just submitted his Ph.D. which investigates the complexities of relationships between men and boys in a dynamic group mentoring program at the Penrith Panthers called Building Young Men. Ben is embedded in the Building Young Men project as a mentor, researcher, and program developer, which he loves.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:Panthers on the Prowl - https://panthersontheprowl.com.au/Building Young Men program - https://panthersontheprowl.com.au/programs/building-young-men/Social Work Discoveries podcast - https://swdiscoveries.com/The Social Work Stories podcast - https://socialworkstories.com/Michael Flood’s book: Engaging Men and Boys in Violence Prevention - https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137442109Steven Roberts’s book: Young Working-Class Men in Transition - https://www.routledge.com/Young-Working-Class-Men-in-Transition/Roberts/p/book/9780367473723bell hooks’s book: The Will to Change - https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Will-to-Change/bell-hooks/9780743456081Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (Loic Wacquant) - https://loicwacquant.org/books/Sage’s Handbook of Youth Mentoring - https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/handbook-of-youth-mentoring/book234516Jim Ife's book: Community Development in an Uncertain World - https://sites.google.com/a/bagygln.web.app/mv/479018-fZmyAAAABen on Twitter - https://twitter.com/benlukejosephThis episode's transcript can be viewed here:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZTTqI9AUKNIh51EEkvn7LspqQv_rLzVqjuPwRYRr5Ro/edit?usp=sharingThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

Hi, and welcome to social work spotlight where I showcase different areas of the profession each episode. I'm your host, Yasmin McKee Wright, and today's guest is Ben Joseph. Ben is a PhD candidate at Western Sydney University with a social work practice background in community mental health, group work with men and boys, and community development with the Penrith Panthers Rugby League Club. He is the founder of two social work-focused podcasts, social work stories and social work discoveries, and has been tutoring across various social work subjects for the Masters and Bachelors of Social Work at Western Sydney University since 2017. He has just submitted his PhD which investigates the complexities of relationships between men and boys

in a dynamic group mentoring program at the Penrith Panthers called Building Young Men. Ben is embedded in the Building Young Men project as a mentor, researcher and program developer, which he loves. Ben engages with the thinking tools of Baudier through his PhD thesis, attempting to investigate power, capital and change in the lives of participants of the Building Young Men Group Mentoring Project. A favourite thing he likes to promote in his classes when tutoring is for students to forget about having the right answers and instead focus on asking better questions. His thesis is titled Understanding the Role of Mentors in Sporting Organisations, Supporting Young Males in their Transcendors. transition towards adulthood. Thank you so much, Ben, for coming on to the podcast.

Really excited to have you here to talk about your research and your social work background in general. Yasmin, it's so cool to be here. Thank you for inviting me. No worries. Firstly, I always ask when you started as a social worker and what drew you to the profession. Yeah, look, it's something I don't really have a specific answer for. and so I have been thinking about it for probably 10 years and don't have a great or direct answer.

I think it's a lot of different things combining that kind of pushed me into this field and got me to study social work and think that this is a profession that I could spend a good portion of my life actually practicing. I think back in the mid-2000s, so I was kind of like early 20s, mid-20s at that point, feeling very disenfranchised with my Sydney-sider life. Look, the corporate rat race towards the million-dollar mortgage wasn't really of interest to me at that time of my life. And so we said, my partner and I, Naomi and I said, that's stuff it.

Let's just forget about the money-making and let's get out of here. year and take our privileges as young, white, middle class Australians and go traveling overseas. And so we did. We went for six months and we just cycled across Europe on a shoestring budget of a few thousand dollars. And we just lived a pretty simple life on a bicycle and with a tent and just went from Portugal to Turkey. And yeah, kind of tried to, this sounds so cliche when I say it out loud, but try and I guess

find ourselves a little bit and work out some priorities for us. And it was kind of during this time that I decided that I'd actually enroll in university for the first time and get some education about how I might work with communities like I grew up in back in the 90s. That's poor, working class, marginalized vulnerable communities. So that's my background. And I've experienced a lot of, I guess, social mobility from that time and place in my life. And yeah, just thinking how I might be able to contribute to others' experiences of that lifestyle was something that interested me. So, look, I wanted to do something meaningful with my life, something of worth. And for me, that was meeting my own gratification. I felt like contributing to communities like my own

that I had in my childhood might be a good way to do that. And so I found a social work degree at Western Sydney uni. I tried enrolling and I got in. And it's funny, my high school mates would never have believed or still wouldn't believe that I actually would go to uni. I was a terrible high school student. I actually purposely sabotaged my own UAI. I think they call it an ATAR now.

Yeah, I sabotage that eligibility by choosing high school subjects that would exclude me from actually achieving it because I just, I did not want that. It wasn't part of my identity at the time. So I swore I'd never go to uni, but life changes you and you shift your thinking, I guess. And so here I am. I'm teaching social work now at a university. We're about to have my PhD, my back pocket. And I just, I don't even know how that 10 to 15 years actually happened to be honest.

Yeah. That's wonderful. Were there any specific moments while you were doing placement, perhaps, that really solidified for you that you'd made the right choice? There were lots of moments in my first placement that taught me that I needed to pull my head in a bit and really critically assess the idea of me being a helper and this kind of a bit of a bit of a white savior kind of guy who's coming in to make changes in the law. world. You know, I learn a lot of lessons about how it is that my privileges actually kind of sit me beyond the scope of change for a lot of people at times. And I've got to be really careful about how it is that I present myself, how it is that I offer advocacy, how it is that I actually create change, contribute to change, I should say probably. And so, yeah, my first

placement was in St George Hospital and that was a steep learning curve for me and one that I'm so grateful for. I failed so many tasks in that placement. I'm glad I stuck on, but it was a lot of learning for me there. But my second placement was very much the reason why I'm doing research now. It was a research placement out at the Penrith Panthers Rugby League club and I'd learned a lot from my previous placement, a lot from my uni degree that kind of made that second placement a huge success. And do you think that Panthers League environment might have been a bit less foreign for you? Do you think that's what helped maybe in terms of really contextualizing where social work fits rather than the traditional hospital placement? I think that I had really gone through a massive

transformation around how I conceptualized social work from that first placement into that second placement. I thought, I mean, I didn't think this literally, like in my mind, but I think there was this part of me that thought, I'm a good student, I think critically, and so I'm the bees, and I'm going to do a really ace job at this hospital placement and learnt really quickly that I was coming at it from a very, I don't know what the word is, I was coming at it from an angle that just didn't quite fit with what they needed. And so that was a steep learning curve that, that led to me to rethink what is it that I'm doing here in social work. And so then when I got the opportunity to go to Panthers, I think I'd done a lot of reading, a lot of soul searching around how it is that

I fit within this social work sector and field. And yeah, rethought my approach somewhat, moving away from that savior figure into someone who is more interested in hearing the voices of communities. And so, yeah, just hit me at the right point that Panthers one, I think. Yeah, it's just reminding me of a few episodes ago. I, had a chat with a lovely social work student. She's just going into third year now. And there was a task that they had to do at uni where they had volunteers and it was like a little test subject for them.

So there was someone in hospital bed and they needed to go in and talk with them. And she identified herself as a problem solver and I see you very much going in with that. I know what's wrong with this person and I know what they need perspective, whereas what they really wanted and what they still want at the university quite rightly is just someone to listen and someone to be there and someone to tell their story too and yes you might have some answers but that's not actually why you're there yeah you really kind of pinpointed it there that the problem solver attitude which is you know something that i've learned from my family and from lots of my friends and it's something that yeah i've had to work on quite a lot in my role for sure yeah so how did you get from

that point to this point. What's the in-between for you? You know, I'm not sure that I've fully ridded myself of it. I think I'd just been able to articulate and critically reflect on my own mind that that's a big part of who I am and what I try to do sometimes. And so, yeah, just being really intentional about identifying that has been really important for many. I've really learned through the research process. So with Panthers, and maybe I'll talk a little bit about Panthers, at some point with you across of this discussion, but with the panther's job, my role

has very much been to elevate or promote the voices of others rather than my own in the community development work. And so I work with all of these kind of adolescent boys who really struggle

at times to articulate their ideas, which are always awesome in my experience, articulate their ideas in ways that they find meaningful that they find others understand them and that type of thing. And so being someone who sits with them and listens and shares those voices to positions of power in the club has been a really, yeah, useful way for me to kind of step back from that problem solver, being the one to fix, being the one to make changes and say, no, my voice actually doesn't really matter in this space. There's some other people. Yeah. And you're almost like a, you facilitate.

that voice being heard. Yeah, yeah, that's right. What other skills or experience have you developed then while you're doing your PhD and what's your topic? Yes, so I've been on a pretty fast track learning curve over the last, yeah, four and a half years of this PhD at Western Sydney University. So my second placement was with the Penrith Panthers Rugby League club. They have a community development arm called the Panthers on the prow.

And the Panthers on the Pral in 2016 decided that they wanted to branch into working with adolescent boys and try their hand at mentoring and see whether they can't create some changes within their communities through some mentoring or mentorship of community boys. So they started a program called Building Young Men. And Building Young Men is a group work mentor. slash mentoring program that lasts about 20 weeks or so and uses a rights of passage process or curriculum, I should say, to talk about things like masculinity and adulthood and change. And they jumped into this idea with the good intentions of trying to do something

for boys in their community, but not having a lot of. of experience around what the evidence base looks like to run something effective with those different intersections. And so they brought me on board as a social worker who the role was designed to measure the impact of the program and create an evidence base at the same time. So I came on board as this fourth year social work student, primarily just to interview participants to find out whether or not they enjoyed the program. but that then transformed very quickly into what do youth mentoring projects look like?

How do they get effective results? What do the boys want from the program? How do we get effective results going forward from that? And how do we talk about masculinity, manhood, talk about life and love and everything in between with teenage boys in a way that is effective for them, that actually creates some change and is healthy for them? And so what I designed through that process was this scoping study that kind of pulled in all of those things and came up with a whole heap of findings and summaries and recommendations that said,

this is a great idea, you're well resourced, it's got some legs, but we need to do a pilot project over a few years with different iterations of this project, learning over the years what it is we need to do to make something really effective here. And so keep me on board. I'll work as a researcher, I'll work as a group facilitator, I'll work as a social worker in this space alongside the team that you've already created and we'll develop this into something's effective. And they said, yes, we want to do that. We'll pay you a scholarship and you can come on board in that participatory action role and do a PhD in this space and actually make something of this that's not just useful for our club and for our organisation and for the boys. but also might be used elsewhere by others once you kind of publish it and get it out there.

So yeah, that's a long-winded way of saying there's a cool mentoring project out in Western Sydney that's happening and I've been really fortunate to be a part of it. Yeah, what an incredible opportunity, especially as a finishing social work student, to kind of get acknowledged for the skills and perspective that you bring to that setting. what do you think makes your contribution as a social worker unique or valuable in that space? My sense is that what I was able to learn at uni through placements, but also in the jobs, the different jobs that I had in social work prior to that experience of the Panthers role was I knew about casework, project work,

I knew about group work, group facilitation, some things about research, and participatory action research. I knew a little bit about sociology, so understanding, I guess, even the skills of breeding academic work and then articulating what that might mean for the practice of social work. I knew about accidental counselling. I knew about all of these different social work skills that I kind of picked up over the course of my degree

and in the work that I was doing and found these are really applicable skills to bring into this community development experience. And so, yeah, it wasn't just one thing in particular, I think. I think it was just realizing that social workers have a really important skill set that they can bring to community development work, youth work, but also work in sports and corporate spaces that perhaps sports and corporate spaces haven't traditionally had.

And so for them, my feeling is that that was a bit of, of fresh air at times to have someone with the skills that I had developed over that time of my studies to say, hey, this is what's going to be really effective for your community development project here. And these are the reasons why. And this is the reason why I can prove it through all these social work textbooks that I've got and readings that I've done and all of that stuff. At the same time, trying not to solve all the problems. But I guess it's more about articulating the effectiveness of the programs and being able to demonstrate the social outcome. Definitely, definitely. You know, my whole methodology for this research project has been very much to take the specific life worlds, the experience of these boys in the program and say to the program facilitators, the club, the sponsors, this is what the boys love. This is what the boys don't get. Here are the voices of the boys. Listen to these boys.

they have something important to say. And yeah, they are definitely listening and it's really cool what they're doing out there now. Yeah, well done. How do you measure project effectiveness? There are so many variables, so many possible outcomes for both the participants and the facilitators. How do you demonstrate what it's doing, what effect it's having? I mean, there's lots of little tools you can use to do that, you know, pre-program measures against post-program measures and those types of qualitative and quantitative measures. For me, that's very scientific-based. What I see is the real key indicator that this project's successful

is that the boys themselves, after four or five years now running this project, are coming back and wanting to be mentors of the next generation of boys, saying this was really important for my experience of growing up through my middle adolescent years, I want to give my time and energy and even money to actually making this project sustainable long term. So these boys are coming back and saying, this is good stuff. It really helped me. Not only that, the boys themselves at the end of the 20 weeks nearly always say, I wish this went for longer. I wish we had something else to transition into. And so after one or two years of getting that feedback, we started an alumni program and the alumni program just keeps the mentors

and the boys connected, not as often, because, you know, obviously all their busy lives and meeting once a week just wasn't quite right for either the men or the boys, but it's more like five to six times a year. They're meeting up and they're just continuing to be in these mentoring relationships that are really just sustained by the boys and the mentors, not so much by the club. They all just do it and get together. And for me, as someone who thinks, oh, how do I measure success in this program? When they take ownership over it and create alumni programs for themselves and come back and feed back into the program, I'm just like, wow. That speaks volumes. That speaks volumes. That's cool. They own it, you know, but I reckon that's awesome.

Yeah. What would you say you love most about the work you're doing at the moment? That's a hard question for me because the PhD hasn't been easy. I'm not naturally an academic. I don't overly enjoy the writing process or anything like that. So there's been a lot of challenges around that lately. In terms of the role itself, though, the program's like a 20-week program. You get to about week six or seven in the project and the boys themselves start to take ownership over the weekly meetings and find that actually this is something worthwhile to them and they start sharing their stories and they start crying with each other and they start laughing and bantering and they build this real sense of community and relationship within the groups and you start to see them

come out of this kind of toxic shell that they think, typically suits them to survive in their masculine domains. And they come out and they say, I want things to change for myself. I want things to change for my little brother. I want things to change in my family. And this is a great way to practice this in this space. And, you know, I want to make some changes. And then at the end of the 20 weeks, you hear back from the parents and they say, my boy's different. One of them said to me once, my boy hasn't told me he's loved me since he was three. And now he's telling me every week. And that, I don't know, something about that change and that transition and that boy feeling safe enough to now start doing that once more. I love that.

That's incredible. What do you find challenging? Yes. I think this academic world of research and publications has not been something that sits with me quite easily. I do have strong feelings of imposter syndrome at times and thinking that what I'm writing and what I'm saying isn't really worth people's time or energy. And so, yeah, I guess dealing with those self-doubt has been tricky. Being able to articulate academically what is so obvious on the ground has been challenging also. Yeah. But I'm really lucky at Western Sydney uni. I have amazing mentors here, people who are interested in what I'm doing, how I'm doing, and the ways in which I go about what I'm doing. And yeah, those mentors, those people are really kind of solid foundations for me to get through all of that

academic stuff, academic writing, academic research, academic rigor, which is so important and so integral. But yeah, something that I've found definitely challenging. Yeah, so they're able to keep you focused on what you're trying to achieve in the first place. And supported and well resourced and because they know what it's like, looking out for my own well-being. And so I'm really grateful to them for that. And it sounds like you're on the home stretch. What have you got left to do? Yeah, yeah.

So the PhD itself has been submitted and it's just being marked as we speak. Wow. So, yeah, we're pretty close. That's terrifying and exciting all at the same time. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't say it any better. While you're talking, I'm thinking about your need to hold a space where, there's a degree of safety for people to feel comfortable telling their stories.

How do you do that and not fall apart at the end of the day? You said you've got plenty of support from the university, but what does that look like? I mean, I feel like the way in which I've approached this work has been quite preventative. I, for one, come from a very similar space to all of these boys. And so I understand some of the things that they're talking about and going through. I empathize with that. It's not a shock to me, the stories that are shared.

And added to that, I keep good boundaries in place with these boys. Even though I work as a mentor and work as a group facilitator and work as a researcher and hear these stories, there's still this hierarchy in place between myself and these boys that suggests that I'm someone that is safe to talk to, but also knows what to do when certain stories arise and I really rely on that kind of social worker boundaries or role to help me manage that. I've surrounded myself with other peers and colleagues who are working in this space, are thinking about masculinitys, adolescence, change, sports clubs. And so we're talking about all the theory, we're talking about all of the practice, we're talking about all of the

stories and sharing with one another. And so that's a great way to debrief. And I kind of try and reframe in my mind around the messages that I hear from the boys. And it's not all sad stuff. A lot of it's really hopeful, bright, visionary, creative stuff. So that boys me as well. But when I do hear the hard stuff, just reframing and saying, well, this is a space for boys to feel safe to talk about their stuff. And in that is a good thing.

That's something that's healthy. And yeah, contributing to that is. it feels great. Yeah. And do you have an exit strategy then in terms of you've put all of your energy and time into this one project for such a long time? What happens when it's all over? Where do you go to from there? Where else can your skills be applied? And what are you interested in doing? Yeah, that question comes at a really interesting time for me because I'm kind of wrapping up a PhD. I'm moving out of that project somewhat in terms of how involved I am in the participatory action role. And so I'm toning down how often I'm there.

I'm thinking, oh, what am I going to do for work now? All of those questions are swirling around in my head at the moment. And so in short, I'm not really sure. But I do want to continue to be involved in what they're doing out at Panthers. And so at the moment, my role is very, much in the supervisory position with the mentors and the group facilitators. So someone that they can debrief with, someone that they can talk to about the stories that they're hearing, someone that these men can kind of bounce ideas off and say, am

I doing a good job here or not? And how do I improve what it is I'm doing? So that's my role at the moment with those guys. I think I'd like to continue doing some research with them. I know the guys here at Western Sydney and Panthers want to continue working out how research might contribute to the work that they're doing in the project and other projects. So I kind of got my hands in there a little bit around how I might be able to be helpful to that.

But yeah, I don't really know what the next six to 12 months are going to hold. You mentioned your teaching as well. Is that something you'd like to explore a bit more? I am teaching and I love teaching here. I mean, this is a big plug for Western Sydney uni, but my experience of teaching, at this university has been so enriching. You know, we've got students from all around the world and all over Western Sydney coming to multiple campuses

and sharing all of their diverse life stories. And so for me, that's like the boys' stories. For me, that's just so cool to hear and think about and work with you and help the students to critically assess. And I see my role not so much as someone to bank knowledge into these students. as Free Air would say, but for someone to sit and listen to these stories and be taught by them and think about how social work might change and be applicable to these guys. And so, yeah, teachings are really great medium for me in that respect. Continuing to work with Western Sydney

next semester on several different social work subjects and just see what happens. Yeah, I don't really have any hard and fast plans around that. I'm just kind of walking through some doors that are presenting themselves and seeing what lands. That sounds sensible. You also don't want to put too much pressure on yourself right now. He just need to kind of ride that wave and just sit back and I guess reflect on what an amazing achievement this has been, both from an outcomes perspective, but also just sticking with a PhD.

So, yeah, that itself takes a little bit of time to wind down from an energy perspective. Definitely. it really, the PhD pushed me to my limits mentally, and especially during a COVID experience, that isolation, yeah, really just, as I said, pushed me to some pretty hard places in terms of trying to get through all this academic work. And so definitely just taking some time for myself to,

I don't want to say heal. It's not like I feel damaged by it or anything like that. Just sit with it and be with it, the feelings and the thoughts and the emotions and the accomplishment and the all of that stuff swirling around in my head and just seeing kind of where it all falls. I'm definitely a person who believes that things have a life cycle. They start with like this amazing like opportunity and vision and there's all this creativity and potential that could happen and then you work through and it kind of develops and become.

this amazing thing of its own and it takes you down different pathways you never saw coming and creates this whole kind of amazing story and then it just it begins to die and close and end and start again and start the process again so that's definitely I'm kind of in that phase of this is closing and this is ending and let's see what is kind of born out of it what's the next thing. It's interesting you mentioned the effect that the COVID shutdowns had on teachers, because often that's not the perspective that's given to the public. It's all about the students and them having to adjust. How did you find that? And was it the same as your peers as the other teachers? It was extremely difficult to take certain social work subjects and transform them into

relevant experiences in an online setting with the same energy and the same intent as you would in the classroom. Our students were stressed. Our students were terrified. Our students were very uncertain. Our students were so graceful in allowing us to make mistakes and allowing us to not know what we're doing and how this stuff translates to an online. experience. So I'm so grateful to them, but it was a really, really hard thing. We're teaching

group work subjects and it's all about environment and space and reading body language and using like very tangible tools in a classroom or in a face-to-face environment and then to translate that into an online experience and say, oh, well, you know, when you do this face-to-face, it'd be different and you'll get it once you're there. And yeah, it was just so, it was a real challenge. And it wasn't just group work. It was all sorts of different social work kind of practice, knowledges and theories to practice that we had were very hard to translate.

And as I said, very, very grateful to this uni in particular, Western Sydney and the students in particular because they just, they let it ride and they did their best and, you know, they kind of got us through it. Yeah. Have you heard about or have you noticed yourself many changes in the way that social work is taught compared with when we were back at university? I mean, we've been on a really big push within our department to work really intentionally around decolonisation, decolonisation.

I don't want to say that that wasn't something that we were thinking about when I studied, but I guess maybe being on this side of the classroom, I feel like we're really putting in an effort to educate ourselves, be educated, and then translate that into how it is we teach about social work. And so, you know, we're reading a lot about decolonising practices, decolonising social work, thinking about multicultural perspectives on social work, thinking really critically about critical race theories and how they apply in the social work field and being really intentional about that. But not just that. Having that then bleed into how it is that we think about

lots of different marginalised oppressed perspectives that we've often never had the time to really explore in the social work degrees and saying, well, that's not good enough. Let's be really really, really intentional about how we think about how we translate these knowledges for our students going forward and make it really relevant. So yeah, I don't know whether that's because I'm now teaching social work that I'm thinking really hard about that or whether or not that's a shift in how social works taught. But I guess it's just something there. Yeah.

And in amongst all of that, in your spare time, you've also been involved in two podcasts. So one where you're the host and one. where you're a producer. Yes. Can you tell me about those and what it's like been involved in those and where they're heading?

Yeah. So I started the social work Discovery's podcast back in 2016, I think. And that was purely selfishly motivated. I couldn't really fully

grasp how social work could actually be research or how social research could actually be social work. I'd heard about it. People talk about it, people write about it, but it just wasn't really making sense in my mind. I wanted some practice experiences of what that meant. So I decided just to start interviewing some people about the intersection between social work and research

and how it's relevant and why we do it. And so, yeah, this podcast was created. And yeah, I think there's maybe like 15 or 20 episodes now across lots of different research projects. lots of different sectors relating to social work, lots of different social workers who, yeah, tell and talk about their research projects as social work. And so, yeah, it's been a really fun ride kind of putting that podcast together. And it's something that will continue as time goes on. I'm doing it fairly sporadically at the moment as interviews just due to my time. But it's been a really cool podcast to really help me understand my research as social work. And,

I know students are using it around the world actually to talk about their own. I mean, they all do some kind of research in their curriculums around the world in different unies. And so this podcast is being used in those spaces, which is pretty cool to help them understand what research is and how it relates. The second one is the social work stories podcast. Now, that's more of a practice-focused podcast. So it interviews social workers currently working in the field, a non-cony work.

Not all of them are anonymous, but most of them are anonymous stories of fairly complex experiences that social workers have had while on the job. And then our hosts of the podcast, Dr. Mim Fox and Liz Murphy, Mim is an academic at Wollongong University, and Liz is a long-time experienced social worker who worked out of several Sydney hospitals, Sydney-based hospitals, and now down south. And they debrief these stories and they talk through what's complex about them, what's ethically challenging about them, what was sad and hard to hear, what was really joyful and successful. And they, yeah, they debrief. And it's really interesting. We get a lot of emails from listeners around the world who say, oh, this is the supervision.

and I've been wanting, I've been needing, I've been, you know, wanting to hear and some really great emails, positive emails from people saying, thank you for putting this podcast together. It really means a lot to them, students, practitioners, retired practitioners, saying, hey, thanks for creating community. So just due to my PhD, I had to wrap up my role with that, but it was a really cool thing to create with Mim and Liz, and they're still going great guns. They've got Justin Stesh on board, who's their producer, now who was a student with us with the placement.

And I think they've now reached quarter of a million downloads worldwide, which is just awesome. So big shout out to those guys at social work stories. Yeah. And I'll put links to both of those podcasts in the show notes that people can go off if they're not familiar as well. But to me, it very much feels like fly on the wall supervision. It's just so interesting to get those perspectives on different areas.

And not just the social worker who's telling the social worker who's telling the social. story telling their case, but Mim and Liz's perspective as academics, as practitioners, they've always got such amazing insights. And yeah, I've definitely highly recommended. I think it's great. Yeah, it was a fun team to be a part of, you know. So Mim and I, we met in Ireland, in Dublin, and we were just out at the pub and we were just chatting. And, you know, she's like, I'm a social worker. And I said, I'm a social worker. And we're, you know, chatting and and then I just said to her, oh, I run this podcast called Social Work Discoveries. And she said, oh, so funny you say that. I want to start a podcast with my friend Liz.

And, you know, we were just waiting to meet someone who was doing social work podcasts. And so, yeah, this whole conversation sparked up and we created this idea together. And yeah, when you get kind of social workers, passionate social workers in a room together, the creativity just flows sometimes. And it's a pretty cool thing. Yeah, absolutely. Is there a conversation that you've had through either of those podcasts that you found particularly interesting or surprising? One I did recently on social work discoveries was with a social worker from the States

who was working in some county jails. And she's actually a musician and retrained and did a master's of social work over there and has taken her skills in music into. the jails and run some like music therapy over there and has to kind of tracked and measured through a research process around how music therapy is really created change in the lives of these inmates and so yeah just listening to those stories I was like oh wow you know social workers are such a creative bunch and we have so many skills that we can just pick up and bring into our practice, from writing skills, storytelling, to agriculture and farming, to music and art,

to yarning, to like all of these really cool skills that a lot of other professions just don't have opportunity to bring into what they do. And yeah, listening to that story about the jails and the music, I thought, yeah, this is a cool profession. I love being in this. days. Yeah. So you've done a lot of research. You've supported other people's research from the sounds of things or at least invigorated their love of research and gotten them interested, which for social work is not as common as I think it could be. Do you have any recommendations for anyone interested in starting research or who have ideas and just don't know what to do with that? Yeah. I mean, it obviously depends on what you're trying to achieve or what you're

trying to do. So I guess just some critical thinking about where research fits with social work, why we use it, how we use it. Definitely start from an approach of understanding how social work research might be participatory, how it might be something that feeds into growth and change, how it might be something that really taps into the ideas of anti-oppressive practices. And, yeah, try and find some reading, whether it's journals or books that kind of speak to that. And then from there, branch out into thinking about different methodologies and practices that might fit within whatever sector it is that you're doing, whether it's youth work, child work, women's health, working with marginalised vulnerable communities,

because there's lots of different methodologies that you can access and use that are effective in those different sectors and spaces. I think for me, thinking about books written by guys like Michael Flood, who wrote a really cool book on engaging men and boys in violence prevention, was a great starting point for me around how it is that I want to take my role as a thinker, a theorist, a researcher, and say, oh, in this space of working with men and boys, we can create some really important changes. and so his book was great for that.

Stephen Roberts' book on young men in transition, working class men in transition, really was quite applicable to the work that I'm doing and I really relied heavily on that to get my thinking around what it is I'm trying to articulate about class and gender and masculinity, multiple masculinities,

and how it is that we conceptualise this and create change in the world. So that was a great book. Bell Hooks' book, The Will to Change, is an incredible read and anyone who's ever read any of her books. We'll know straight away that that's a good recommendation because, yeah, she just has this way of being able to actually zone in on what's actually happening

critically out there in the world, particularly in this book around men's health and men's thinking and well-being. So that was a really important book for me to think about. I've used a lot of Pierre Bourgeois's kind of philosophy, I suppose, and thinking tools to create methodologies for me. And so his books are really dense. They're really hard to read. But there's some really cool books out there that help articulate what it is he is saying

and how it is that I might, with my simple mind, actually understand what's going on on his pages and how might be relevant to the work. Because he talks so much about power and positionality, doesn't he? A lot. Yeah, a lot about reflexivity around how it is that you. you as the researcher actually have a position of power in the words that you articulate about those you research. And so being intentional about positioning yourself in the field of research is crucial in understanding how power it works in that field and how it is that you can actually

pull strings to make things look certain ways. And so be really intentional about how you articulate things when you're doing research is what Pierre Bourgeois says. Yeah, so Louis Waukeont's book, he did participatory kind of research in a boxing gym called Mind, Body and Soul, I think. That was a really great way in which he explored Pierre Bourgeois' methodologies and brought it to life. And so it was something that I was really interested in trying to do with the Building Young Men Project. Yeah, they're just off the top of my head some things I've been reading over the last of the while. Yeah, brilliant. It sounds like it's been massaging away as you apply that to the work.

that you're doing at the moment. And it kind of falls back on what you were saying before about the critically reflective practice because that's so much about acknowledging the position and perspective and the either unconscious or conscious bias that you bring to something in order to meet someone where they're at and figure out what sits with them, listen, share the voices of people,

and then be able to share those voices with the people that have the power in the club. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, you pretty much summarised my final chapter. I look forward to reading it. It sounds like, and not a lot of people can say that about PhDs. You've touched on something that is just so incredibly worthwhile and obviously has so many applications, not just to that setting, but so many others.

Obviously, your next step would be putting it into digestible chunks and publishing papers based on your findings, I imagine. Yeah, I'll try. to do that. I'm not overly excited by the idea of being the guy who puts out solo papers and goes down the real solo journal track of getting published and that type of thing, although that's really important for people's careers and it's very much the work you need to do in this space. I think I'm excited and maybe I'm thinking a little bit with rose-colored glasses or something, but I'm excited about collaborating on this kind of writing and bringing

the PhD to others and saying, all right, let's take what you're doing, let's take what I'm doing, and let's make something cool out of this and some writing that might be energizing to contribute towards. And so I'll be looking for that with people and seeing what comes of it. Yeah, hopefully it's an exciting process, not something I find overly laborious. I'm sure I won't. Yeah. If anyone's interested in knowing more about, so your approach, it sounds like, as you've taken participatory action research to framework what you're doing, but also maybe taking into consideration group facilitation theories and practice. If anyone was interested in reading more about those sorts of things, where would you direct them?

You know, a brilliant book that I read often is Sage's handbook on youth mentoring. And it just takes all these really kind of cool projects. And through the lens of youth mentoring, like speaks about what it is that they do. And so, yeah, I would really recommend, I mean, it's a little bit pricey because it's one of those sage handbooks, but it's one of those tools that youth workers and group workers, anyone who's interested in the space of mentoring can use to actually find out what evidence-based practice looks like, what group work for youth look like, yeah, what mentoring kind of standards look like. Yeah, that's a great book. I use that a lot in my thinking and writing.

Yeah, well, even if organizations were to purchase one and then have it, it doesn't have to be for social work. Yeah, definitely. I loved it. Yeah, great book. Yeah, I've loved hearing both about the community work you've done and really reflecting on your position of privilege, as you were saying, and making radical change from that. But also, the podcasts are fascinating to me, being able to hear from contemporary social work researchers on how their projects can affect social or practical change. So you've got your fingers in many pies. You've definitely been very busy and it's all culminated to this point, which is such

an incredible achievement just to get through the PhD in the first place, but to have submitted it. And now you kind of have to sit back and wait and see what feedback comes for you. But yeah, congratulations firstly, just getting that done. And also for having this vision and putting yourself in a position where it might not. be a traditional social work role, but you've said, no, hang on, there is a role for social work here. So let's, let's capitalize on that, I guess. And in doing that, you've also contributed to the general public's understanding of what social work can be and can do. So it's not just about you putting yourself in there and having work to do and experience, but it is actually contributing

to the social work profession in my perspective. Yeah, thanks, Yasmin. I really appreciate you saying that. That's really kind of you. I guess as I listen to you speak there, I think to myself, yeah, I don't think I would be doing this if it wasn't creative and if it wasn't an experience or a role that really tried to push the boundaries on how it is that we practice change or create change or contribute to change. I love the fact that the social work sector has the space to be creative, to create visions. To be. one of those jobs of the future. You know how like we often hear people talking about, oh, the children born today, they'll be doing jobs that we've never, ever heard of. Well, my sense is,

well, yeah, they might just be social workers and they're doing that. They're doing stuff that we never thought of because this is a creative space. This is something that you don't feel kind of overly boxed in at times. Well, I don't like to anyway with the social work stuff. So I love the fact that this sector allows me to have, you know, my fingers in lots of different pies and be doing lots of different things, from research to podcasts, to group work, to youth work, to mentoring, to teaching, to, you know, all of this stuff and knowing that each and every one of those things is social work practice and social work informed and is enjoyable. So, yeah, as I listen to you speak, that's kind of what I was thinking in the back of my mind.

Yeah, great. I hear and I read so much about professional automation, especially with all this technology coming out. And as you're talking, I'm thinking, there's no way that can be automated. Maybe you can get a bot to write your papers for you. In terms of actually sitting down with the people and making that real connection, it's just not possible. There are so many ways that social work can be influential and it has to happen. As you were saying, not via a computer screen. You can't connect. You can, but it's not. the same. So I think there's such opportunity for social work and it just continues to become a parent, the more I talk to incredibly inspiring and creative as you were saying, but also just people who want to make that change and can really see that this isn't the social work I learned about, but this is kind of the social work that I'm creating, which is really cool. Yeah. So I don't do you know Jim Ife? Have you heard of Jim I? Yeah. Yeah. So Jim was recently here at Western Sydney University. And so I got to know him a bit and help him with some of his books and I guess just contributing to the way in which he's writing them, which was really cool

opportunity. But again, as I was listening to you speak, it made me think of some of the stuff that he's coming out with soon. And I hope I'm not stepping on his toes here by saying this. I don't think I am. But he writes recently about how as this age of the Anthropocene, this like human that controls everything that is like the predominant predator in the world. As this kind of era is coming to an end, social work has a role to play in picking up the pieces when things all come crashing down. And so in that moment, in that experience, in that process, I should say, there is so much opportunity to be creative, to be visionary, to be people who are equipped,

enough with the critical thinking skills and the knowledge and the practices and the courage to actually think outside the box around how it is that we're going to overcome all of this stuff that's going on in the world from climate change to war famine lack of water, global movements of people and all the pressures that we're finding on our current climate. And yeah, so as I hear you speak, it makes me think of Jim's writing and just like, yeah, as sad as, the world is and what we're facing, we as a profession have the ability to do something about it. Now and into the future, what that looks like. Hopefully, well, that's shifting and changing and growing and improving and all of that. And I want to be the person that's contributing to that

and doing something about that. Yeah, be part of the change. Definitely. Oh, brilliant. Thank you again so much for your time. I've really, really enjoyed having to chat with you been and again I just think it's so inspiring for everyone in social work for academics clinicians community workers researchers just to know that this work is being done that social workers are doing it and that it is possible to use everything that you've learned at uni everything has culminated in really seeing where your contribution is feeling valuable being able to articulate it so yeah I encourage people to get in contact with you if there's anything that they'd like to follow up about your research or ask any questions, but otherwise, thank you so much.

It's been incredibly enlightening for me as well. Honestly, it's been a pleasure. Great conversation. I've really enjoyed speaking with you about this stuff and exploring it. It's not until you get asked these questions that you really start to work out what you think about them sometimes. And so having that opportunity has been great. Yeah, people feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at Ben Luke Joseph. And yeah, I'm happy just to to chat and talk and give my perspectives if they are helpful to anyone anytime. So yeah, no, thanks for the opportunity. And thanks to your listeners.

I think there must be a pretty cool bunch of people. Thank you. Thanks for joining me this week. If you would like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Ben, please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm slash social work spotlight. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or you can email SW Spotlight Podcast at gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you.

Please also let me know if there is a particular topic you'd like discussed, or if you or another person you know would like to be featured on the show. Next episode's guest is Stephanie, who has worked as a clinical social worker in both the homelessness and drug and alcohol sectors over the last 10 years. During this period, she has developed a strong interest in challenging systemic and structural barriers, identifying solutions and championing diversity.

She completed a Masters of Public and Social Policy in 2020 and currently holds the role of Homeless Health Program Manager for Southeastern Sydney Local Health District. I release a new episode every two weeks. Please subscribe to my podcast so you will notify when this next episode is available. See you next time.