[Articles] Sustaining Sociability and Keeping It Alive in Residential Long-Term Care for People With Dementia

5 October, 2026 Leave a comment
Alexandre Lambelet, Fabienne Malbois and Benjamin Tremblay (2026)

Nursing homes, especially those caring for people with dementia, are often perceived as “cold” or “silent” places where conversation is rare and the main tasks of professionals are to help residents with their daily activities. This article presents an analysis of ethnographic data collected in a nursing home in French-speaking Switzerland and links it to Georg Simmel’s analyses of sociability. It focuses mainly – but not exclusively – on scenes involving members of the sociocultural team and demonstrates that the care provided by professionals to create and support exchanges between and with residents is a valuable resource for community building, benefiting both residents and professionals.

Keywords: sociability, nursing homes, dementia, chit-chat, care, social relationship, Simmel

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[Articles] Atmospheres of Trust: Understanding Social Work in Swiss Prisons

19 March, 2026 Leave a comment
Martin Böhnel, Julia Emprechtinger and Marina Richter (2025)

Prisons are usually described as spaces of institutional mistrust. In an ethnographic study on social work in Swiss prisons, we experienced several moments when we felt that there was “trust in the air”. Inspired by phenomenological and post- humanist thinking, we take these moments as entry points to explore trust in prison. We aim to understand how atmospheres of trust emerge and how they affect the relational work between social workers and incarcerated people. For social work, it seems pivotal to acknowledge the affective power of material and immaterial elements to co-create together with (non-)human elements atmospheres of trust as a basis for relational work.

Keywords: social work, post-humanism, prison, atmospheres of trust

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[Articles] Digital Media and Children’s Well-Being in Residential Care

16 August, 2025 Leave a comment
Marion Pomey, Michele Wang and Carina Pohl (2025)

This article analyzes data from a qualitative study that aims to investigate the well-being and vulnerability of children and adolescents in residential care. The empirical findings focus on the importance of digital media for children’s and adolescents’ well-being from their perspectives. The results highlight how smartphones enable more possibilities and the creation of digital spaces for the creation and maintenance of well-being, emphasizing social relationship as the basis for autonomy, identity, safety and agency. It also reveals the importance for vulnerability associated with digital media, including unwanted attention and harassment. The results call for a balanced approach of providing protection but still maintaining participation and thus cautioning against excessive control and punitive measures regarding digital media in residential care.

Keywords: alternative care, digitalization, well-being, vulnerability, childhood studies

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[Call] Call for papers (until 30.04.2024)

17 October, 2023
Call: Post-Humanismus und Soziale Arbeit? Empirische und theoretische Erkundungen. / Call: Post-humanisme et travail social ? Explorations empiriques et théoriques. / Call: Post-humanism and Social Work? Empirical and theoretical explorations.

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[Articles] The analysis of non-take-up. Beyond the service relation model.

30 June, 2018

Service relations are not systematically fluid, and resistance is sometimes encountered in cases of non-take-up. The service relation model fails to take this into account. Therefore, as service agents’ work consists in dealing with users’ relations not only with themselves, but also with the offer, the analysis of non-take-up of rights and services requires a specific analytical model. This model would need to take users into account along with their relations to the offer and the normative content of that offer, over and above its delivery. In this respect, the social relation to the service model is more appropriate.

Author(s): Philippe Warin

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