I started this series with a small win. This one asks a harder question: why do some exclusions dissolve the moment you name them, while others fight back — sometimes violently — when you try to change them at all?

This article starts by revisiting the mayor and the parking garage. In an earlier piece I wrote about an ableist parking system and how the mayor changed it after one conversation. What stuck with me afterward wasn't that she changed — it was how easily she did. But I do work every day that is the opposite of easy. So the piece is an attempt to answer why some change comes easy and other change comes hard: I think it comes down to how deep the script is buried. The mayor only had to extend a category. Some people are being asked to restructure a foundation — and a foundation doesn't move without the whole house shaking.

Slavoj Žižek adapts Jacques Lacan's idea of traversing the fantasy — the point at which a person works all the way through their most fundamental organizing script and comes out the other side of it. An incursion is the violent front end of that process: the moment a reality crashes into that script suddenly, hostilely, and disruptively, threatening the whole structure before any working-through has happened. Most people, faced with an incursion, don't traverse anything. They defend. And nothing captures the incursion better, for me, than my own memory of the slack-jawed, ground-zero moment of coming out to a non-affirming parent — the look on a face when the map stops working.

The claim I brace for pushback on: I name the non-affirming parent's reaction as terror wearing the mask of conviction rather than simple malice. I want to be plain about what that is and isn't, because it's easy to misread — it is not an exculpation. We do anti-oppressive practice. We do anti-racist practice. Full stop. What the distinction changes is not whether we hold the harm accountable, but where we meet someone, and whether the change we're after actually survives the encounter.

Feedback welcome — especially from anyone who's sat across from a parent, a client, or a family member whose reaction to change felt less like cruelty and more like fear, and had to decide what to do with that without letting anyone off the hook.

- The Social Construction Worker

https://socialconstructionworker.substack.com/p/the-easy-traverse-and-the-hard-one

What are things/methods/resources/hacks to access free things for my clients?

im doing research on ex-cons(parolees) and supervised visits with their kids. What kinds of questions would a social worker ask the parolee before arranging a visit for the first time?

The first two pieces asked what the built world excludes and what a single word like "compliant" flattens. This one asks a harder question: what happens when the document itself -not just its vocabulary, but its entire genre - decides who gets to be a person in it and who becomes a case.

The court report is one of the most consequential documents in child welfare. A judge who has never met a family will decide their future largely on what this document says about them. I started in a small county, where thoroughness meant demonstrating compliance down to the dates. What I didn't catch at first was how that same thoroughness could organize a parent's whole life into categories designed for tracking, and still fail to let them be visible as a person.

I shoehorn a lot into this piece. It's about a family and a court report. But it's also about a moment with my supervisor that produced the report. And then I couldn't help but give a little bit of a denouement to how this family is doing to illustrate how the report seems to start producing the family and me through the case. It's an argument that the form is doing theoretical work most of us never examine, and that the form is a negotiated site of meaning that I alone do not write. And it's an argument that how small choices in how a report gets written are choices about whose humanity survives translation into the document a judge will actually read.

Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who's written one of these reports and felt the gap between what they knew about a family and what the form let them say.

- The Social Construction Worker

https://socialconstructionworker.substack.com/p/the-report

Hello everyone! I am hoping someone can help me get this book Unpacking the Pyramid Model: A Practical Guide for Preschool Teachers. Brookes Publishing ISBN: 978-1-68125-390-

I'm in college to become a social worker and need this book for my guiding behavior class. Trying to find it on discount or low as possible. Thank you!

Hello! I’m currently finishing my BSW in Minneapolis and preparing to get my MSW in an advance standing program. I hope to specialize in trauma and violence but I’m finding that there are not many schools that offer trauma specialization.

I’m hoping to relocate to a bigger city and UW has been a high choice for me because of the location and trauma specific classes. However, I know that the UW MSW program is difficult to get into and very expensive so I’m trying to learn all my options.

I also really like options in Chicago like crown and Uchicago. Some sources say crown has trauma specialization if you take the justice path but after reading through on the official website I’m not sure that path would be a good fit. I’ve also read some pretty negative thoughts on both Chicago schools so I’m torn. I’m open to any and all suggestions or comments about these schools or others!!

Please help!!

The first piece showed how the built world excludes bodies it never considered. This one is about how language does the same thing to people.

For six years I wrote "compliant" into court reports without examining it. Mom is compliant. Dad has been compliant with services. It's the word everyone uses - supervisors, court orders, training materials. It means that the parent did what the court told them to do. What it doesn't tell you is who the family is, what participation cost them, or what their love for their children actually looks like up close.

This piece traces "compliant" back the same way the first piece traced the ticket machine back to a set of unexamined assumptions about whose knowledge counts. Miranda Fricker's concept of hermeneutical injustice does real work here: families often lack the words to articulate why being called "compliant" doesn't feel like being seen, because the institution's vocabulary is the only vocabulary in the room.

The piece also tries something constructive rather than just diagnostic by comparing two ways of writing about the same mother, one in the system's flattening language and one that tries to let her be visible inside the system's required categories. It's not a call to abandon institutional language entirely. It's an argument that within the narrow space practitioners actually have, small choices about how we write families into existence for court stakeholders matter more than we usually admit.

This is also where the human rights framing of the series starts to take real shape in the distinction between exclusion from resources and exclusion from participation in the meaning-making that decides what you're seen to need in the first place.

Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who's caught themselves writing the institutional shorthand without examining what it's doing.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-193416573

- The Social Construction Worker

I'm the founder of mPathy, an anonymous peer support app that matches people with someone who's actually been through what they're going through. Not a trained volunteer, not a group chat. One person who gets it.

We call it mental support: real human connection when you need it most, whether that's grief, anxiety, or any mental health challenge you're carrying.

The market is validated, Supportiv has 3M+ users, Wisdo was acquired by Talkspace, 7 Cups has touched 72M+ lives. Nobody owns the 1:1 matched, direct-to-consumer lane built around mental support rather than therapy. That's where we're building

Would love to get feedback from folks in this space

My grandmother recently got guardianship of my 16-year-old little brother. Our mom passed away in 2014, and he's been raised by other family members since he was about 5. They recently gave up guardianship, saying they couldn't handle him anymore. Whenever we asked what was going on or how we could help, they were very vague and even made comments like, "Well, he won't kill you in your sleep."

Since moving in with us, he's been collecting weapons, making collages of guns, lying constantly, stealing, and manipulating people around him. He seems to crave attention and validation at any cost. He was hospitalized after threatening to take his own life when we confiscated his electronics.

He's also been intentionally failing school and has exhibited concerning behavior toward younger and emotionally vulnerable people. Some of those actions have been reported to the appropriate authorities and are currently being investigated. The police have told us they're speaking with the district attorney to determine what, if any, legal action can be taken. At the same time, people are helping us look into resources and possible options for our family.

We've told the hospital that we genuinely believe he needs residential treatment because we're concerned about both his safety and the safety of everyone in the home. He's even said himself in the past that he thinks he needs residential treatment, so this isn't a new idea. We're hoping they'll take those concerns seriously and fully evaluate what level of care is appropriate.

One of the things that's been hardest for me was confronting him about sexting a 13 year old. I was telling him the police took his phone, and he was under investigation. His response was to laugh and say, "That was like a year ago," as if it wasn't a big deal. The problem is that wasn't even true, the messages were from the end of January into February of this year. His reaction and apparent lack of concern have made me even more worried.

I'm honestly terrified that he'll be released before we have a safety plan in place. I don't feel safe with him coming back into the house right now, and I don't know what to do. I'm scared that someone could get hurt if he comes home before everyone has a clear plan.
Has anyone been through something similar? If your family pursued residential treatment for a teenager, what was that process like? Were you able to get the help they needed, and how did you handle the time before a long-term plan was in place? What if he tries to kill us?

I'm not going into details or throw the whole issue with what's going on with a social worker involved in the homeless community as well as personal relationships I feel shouldn't be happening, if I can get any answers for this I would appreciate it please and thank you. I would like to go further into explaining more if I would doing the right thing reporting this please message me.

I'm a child welfare case manager with six years in the field and a freshly minted MSW. I write a Substack called The Social Construction Worker, a pseudonymous project that explores a theoretical framework I've been building at the intersection of child welfare practice, social construction theory, and a deep suspicion of any map that mistakes itself for the territory.

The framework is called the nos, from the Latin for "we." The intention is to invoke the imagery of a "social ego" and to provide a diagnostic tool/vocabulary for macro level social work. Nos is an attempt to name how collective social reality gets produced, maintained, and disrupted through the everyday performances of practitioners, families, and institutions. The series tries to integrate important theory with relevant field ethnography and provide readers with reflection and tools for navigating the macro social world outside of the therapist's office.

I'll be posting articles here in publication order with a brief behind-the-scenes commentary: the theoretical decisions, the ethnographic choices, what the piece is trying to do that the article itself doesn't say out loud. Think DVD commentary track for social work theory. I hope you find it useful and enjoyable!

The Ticket Machine

First thing to note is that everything has been deidentified - names were changed and locations were left ambiguous.

The first piece opens with Mark, who was my task instructor during my semester-long practicum. Mark is a brilliant and natural community organizer and agency leader with cerebral palsy who cannot reach the downtown parking garage ticket machine from his hand-controlled vehicle. Nobody designed the machine to exclude him. Nobody sat in a meeting and decided disabled people didn't deserve access to downtown. The exclusion is quieter than that.

What Mark's work made visible to me - and what this piece tries to name - is the difference between the concrete physical structures that organize our social world and the unconscious scripts that produced them. I'm calling those scripts concretive protocols. The ticket machine is concrete. The unexamined assumption that the reaching body is an able body is the protocol. The protocol preceded the structure. And once the structure hardened, the assumption became invisible - not hidden, just no longer necessary to examine.

The piece follows Mark into the mayor's office, where he makes the case for app-based parking payment. The moment when the mayor's eyes moved is still one of the clearest examples I've seen of what it looks like when a concretive protocol dissolves and begins to "reconcretize" around a different center.

The concrete imagery is an intentional decision from my work with the disabled community (as is my identity-first language), which had a profound impact on me. Disability is the otherness category where "the rubber meets the road" so to speak. At some point after watching these individuals liaise with the built world, I came to realize that the cities and towns that sit upon the natural environment were nothing more than able-bodied adaptive technology to live in a more self-actualized way within the natural world (for better or worse). And in a way that was 1) excluding body diversity systemically and 2) considering body diversity as nonnormative or as pathology.

Once I contemplated the micro interactions of a low-vision individual attempting to navigate an app that doesn't work with their reader technology, I began to question the meaningful distinction I was making between what I called "disability" and my "able-body's" glasses to address my myopia and astigmatism or the infrared technology that helps humans view "visible data" beyond our evolutionary limits.

The piece is also the piece that started everything theoretically. The framework that runs through the rest of the series originated from watching Mark navigate a world that wasn't built for him and realizing that the same analysis applied to every protocol I'd been running for six years without examining.

Feedback is most welcome, especially from practitioners who recognize the rooms. I hope you enjoy the first piece!

- The Social Construction Worker

Link:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-191923937

Hello I am located in California. I am asking for help on behalf of my brother. Him and his Partner separated awhile back and she moved away with their son. He doesn’t have an official plan with her on how to visit him or how to financially support them. He’s unemployed and usually when he does come up with some money she allows him to see him as long as she receives some money which i think it’s fair. My issue with this is that there’s no official record of this happening. He’s a Traumatic Brain Injury victim and while he’s very capable and without talking negatively on the other individual i feel like he is being taking advantage emotionally through the use of my nephew. Because of his accident, he doesn’t feel secure in contacting a social worker. I have suggested it many times but I myself don’t know much. I was wondering if despite his employment statues and health if he were to reach out for help is there any hope for him and his family to have visitation granted? Eveytime i suggest it he lists down reasons why it’ll be worse for him because of his conditions. He believes it’ll actually grant no visitation at all but im not sure if that’s how it works. We don’t know anything and this lack of knowledge is taking time away from him and involvement in his son’s life and development. Can someone explain to us what a typical scenario plays out when a social worker gets involve in separated family. I don’t even know how to word this post. we just need guidance. thank you so much.