New Books: Social Work

Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. Rooted in a long-term study, Relinquished is an analysis of hundreds of in-depth interviews with American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption; stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level.

The link between homelessness and mental health disorders is undeniable. Both are strongly affected by social and economic determinants such as poverty, migration, unemployment, access to healthcare, and urbanization and, as a result, providing optimal care in the community requires understanding of the cultural context. Written and edited by experts drawn from different cultural and geographical perspectives, this unique resource covers key topics such as COVID-19, dental issues, chronic pain, the experiences of specific vulnerable groups, as well as case studies.

LGBTQ youth are disproportionately represented in the U.S. youth homelessness population. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, Coming Out to the Streets maps the LGBTQ youth's lives prior to experiencing homelessness and while they live on the streets, deal with police, and navigate shelters and services for people experiencing homelessness. Through this documentation, Robinson shows how poverty and racial inequality shape how LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness negotiate their gender and sexuality.

Part case studies, part meditation on the past, present and future of the disease, this book traces Alzheimer's disease from its discovery and tells the story of the biomedical breakthroughs that may allow it to finally be prevented and treated by medicine. While it is a scathing indictment of our health care system, it is also an argument for how we can live with dementia; the ways patients can reclaim their autonomy and redefine their sense of self, how families can support their loved ones, and the innovative reforms we can make as a society that would give caregivers and patients better quality of life.

A team of psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, nursing scholars, and public health researchers set out to discover the effect of receiving versus being denied an abortion on women's lives. Over the course of a ten-year investigation that began in 2007, Foster and her team followed a thousand women, some of whom received their abortions, some of whom were turned away. Foster analyzes the impact on their mental and physical health, their careers, their romantic lives, their professional aspirations, and even their existing and future children--and finds that women who received an abortion were almost always better off than women who were denied.

Racism is imbued within the structures of our society. The 13th Grand Challenge is boldly calling social workers to extract this systemic stronghold from its profession and breathe new life into a field that has the capacity to transform our society. To facilitate this necessary disruption, social workers must be willing to critically engage in an exploration of the meaning of racism and its impact on social work in order to work towards its elimination from society and the profession.

Social Work and Social Welfare provides a global, human rights perspective on social welfare policies that are at the forefront of controversy in today's world. Structured around one of the concepts students struggle with the most--the research question--this book begins with how to understand the role of good questions before demonstrating how questions underpin good research designs and how social research can be framed as asking and answering questions.

According to the last census, one in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some are visible, some are hidden--but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Activist Alice Wong brings together an urgent, galvanizing collection of personal essays by contemporary disabled writers. Taken together, this anthology gives a glimpse of the vast richness and complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own assumptions and understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now.

This collection of 14 case studies that model LGBTQ+ affirmative social work practice offers real-life scenarios from a range of social work scholars, educators, and practitioners, representing diverse sexualities, genders, and intersectional identities. Together, they demonstrate contemporary, multi-level, queer-affirming social work practice with LGBTQ+ people and communities. Chapters explore issues such as finding trans-affirming care for teens, methamphetamine abuse among elderly gay men, previously exploited teens reentering foster care, navigating nonmonogamous relationships, and more.

When Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, the illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. Here she explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. She will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally perversely glorious.