Dr Hannah Jobling

Profile

Areas of expertise

• Comparative and international social work
• Mental health law, policy and practice
• Social work with young people
• The policy-practice relationship
• Critical realism
• Qualitative research methods
• The history of social work

Academic biography

I joined the Department in July 2014 after working for 16 years in social care in the UK, Australia and South Africa with a variety of groups, including young people, people with learning difficulties and refugees. I qualified as a social worker in 2009 and went on to practice in youth justice.

My PhD (completed in 2016) used a critical realist framework for an ethnographic study of mental health policy in action – specifically how compulsory community care is enacted and experienced by practitioners and service users, and with what consequences. I won the 2015 inaugural prize for outstanding publication based on doctoral research, awarded by the European Association of Social Work Research.

My experiences in practice and research – particularly in fields where individuals are compelled to engage with services - have led to an enduring interest in how social work practitioners negotiate the various policy mandates and pressures that are placed upon them as the mediator between individuals and society, and in particular how this impacts on the work they do, and their relationships with service users. Similarly, I am interested in how service users respond to and navigate the experience of compulsion.

An emerging area of interest for me has been the position and interpretation of social work in different places and over time. I recently developed a new postgraduate-level programme in comparative and international social work, and have a particular interest in the development of social work in China. This is coupled with interest in the history of social work and its development as a practice and discipline.

Professional activities

• Member of the Mental Health Qualitative Research Network
• Trustee of Sidewalk Youth Project Scarborough
• Member of the European Social Work Research Association Prizes and Sponsorship Committee

Teaching

I teach across the BA, MA and MSocW Social Work programmes, as well as the MA in Comparative and International Social Work. My teaching covers various domains of social work and social policy, including social research methods, international social work, youth justice, youth social work, social policy for social work and the history of social policy and social work.

Research

Research labels

• Comparative and international social work
• Mental health law, policy and practice
• Social work with young people
• The policy-practice relationship
• Critical realism
• Qualitative research methods
• The history of social work

PhD supervision interests

Comparative and international social work; Mental health social work and services; social work with young people, particularly young people within the youth justice system; the operation of power and the use of coercion and compulsion; discretion and decision making in practice; ethical frameworks for practice; qualitative research methods, particularly ethnography; critical realist approaches; the translation of policy into practice; service development in local government; history of social work and welfare more generally.

Research projects

2019 to 2021: Parents and their Communities. A qualitative study of the potential for asset-based approaches to support parents with learning difficulties. Co-investigator with Dr Jenny Threlfall and Dr Katie Graham. Funded by the National Institute for Health Research for Patient Benefit Programme.

2018 to 2019: Gendered processes of marginalisation and disconnection: co-production with young women in North Yorkshire’s coastal towns. Co-investigator with Dr Aniela Wenham. Funded by the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account.

2015 to 2016: A review of intensive supervision and surveillance: young people and practitioner’s perspectives. Co-investigator with Dr Aniela Wenham. Funded by the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account.

2013 to 2015: The British Journal of Social Work: a case study of applied scholarship. Co-investigator with Professor Ian Shaw. Funded by the British Association of Social Workers.

Publications

Books and journal articles

Jobling, H. and Shaw, I. (2019). The worlds of social work writing. European Journal of Social Work (accepted/in press).

Jobling, H. (2019). Discretion from a critical perspective. In Evans, T. and Hupe, P. (eds) Discretion and the Quest for Controlled Freedom. London: Palgrave.

Campbell, J., Davidson, G., McCusker, P., Jobling, H. and Slater, T. (2019). Community treatment orders and mental health social work: issues for policy and practice in the UK and Ireland. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 64, 230-237.

Jobling, H. (2019). The legal oversight of community treatment orders: a qualitative analysis of tribunal decision-making. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 62, 95-103.

Jobling, H., Shaw, I., Hyun Jang, I., Czarnecki, S. and Ramatowski, A. (2017). A case study of applied scholarship: British Journal of Social Work 1971-2013. British Journal of Social Work, 47(8), 2170-2200.

Jobling, H. (2016). Local policy in a global context: regimes of risk in mental health policy and practice – the case of Community Treatment Orders. In Evans, T. and Keating, F. (eds) Policy and Social Work Practice, London: Sage.

Jobling, H. (2016). What counts as ‘counter-conduct’? A governmental analysis of resistance in the face of compulsory community care. In Fenger, M., Hudson J. and Needham, C. (eds) Social policy review 28: Analysis and debate in social policy, 2016. Bristol: Policy Press.

Research report - Shaw, I., Jobling, H., Jang, I., Czarnecki, S. and Ramatowski, A. (2016). The British Journal of Social Work: A Case Study of Applied Scholarship. Final Report. For the British Association of Social Workers, the British Journal of Social Work Editorial Board and Oxford University Press, and funded by BASW.

Wenham, A., Jobling, H. and Brooks-Wilson, S. (2016). A review of intensive supervision and surveillance: young people and practitioner’s perspectives. Final report. For City of York Council and funded by the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account.

Journal article – Hardy, M. and Jobling, H. (2015). Beyond power/knowledge: developing a framework for understanding knowledge ‘flow’ in international social work, European Journal of Social Work, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 525-542.

Jobling, H. (2014). Using ethnography to explore causality in mental health policy and practice, Qualitative Social Work, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 49-68.