Dr Joanne Warner came to Kent in 2005, having previously held lectureships in Health and Social Care at The Open University and in Applied Social Studies at the University of Oxford. She has a background as a practitioner in social work and community development, and until recently as a lay Mental Health Act Manager in an NHS Trust.
Dr Warner’s research interests broadly fall under the umbrella of sociological approaches to risk in health and social care, with a particular focus on using qualitative research methods to understand the way risk is constructed in contemporary society. She is particularly concerned to improve our understanding of the way ‘risk work’ has shaped professional practice and the impact of cultures of inquiry, fear and blame on social workers and others. She has undertaken several projects involving the qualitative analysis of documents such as inquiry reports, serious case reviews and media accounts such as newspaper reports.
In her early research (including her PhD), Dr Warner focused on the role of homicide inquiries in constructing risk and blame in the mental health field, particularly as these mechanisms intersect with gender and ‘race’. More recently she has shifted attention to parallel processes in child protection and the ‘emotional politics’ of risk, covered in her book ‘The Emotional Politics of Social Work and Child Protection’. She has also developed an interest in understanding the way people negotiate everyday risk and insecurity; especially the role of ‘affective community spaces’ such as cafes and libraries in the lives of people who are perceived as outsiders or are otherwise marginalised.
The main aim of all her work is to contribute to the production of critical knowledge and understanding that will help produce positive change.
One major strand of Dr Warner’s current work involves the analysis of political and media discourses around risk in child protection – specifically in response to child abuse deaths. In her research on the ‘Baby P’ case, she used qualitative documentary analysis to understand more about the role of politicians and the press in the events that unfolded. She has also investigated the newspaper coverage of the case in relation to critical moral panic theory, arguing that an analysis of class politics is fundamentally important in understanding how the case was reported. This research is reported in two recent articles: ‘Heads must roll’? Emotional politics, the press, and the death of Baby P' and 'Social work, class politics and risk in the moral panic over Baby P'
The second major strand of Dr Warner’s current research focuses on ‘affective community spaces’, and is in collaboration with Gerry Bennison and Dawn Talbot. They are interested in the care that people experience in everyday places such as cafes and libraries. Their first research project was a study of a local cafe, where they showed how ‘care work’ and subtle forms of risk management are undertaken in everyday and mundane ways in sites not normally associated with caring. They investigate how such work is carried out by people who have no formal or informal responsibility to care or manage risk, and in ways that are invisible to all but those that are directly involved in the relationship. This study is reported in their recent article 'The cafe as affective community space: reconceptualising care and emotional labour in everyday life' in Critical Social Policy. They have recently turned their attention to libraries as sites of care and emotional labour.
Since spring 2008, Dr Warner has been engaged in a knowledge exchange project on the theme of risk and decision-making with staff and senior managers in Kent County Council’s Children’s and Adult’s Social Services Directorates. The aim of this work is to address the current negative preoccupation with risk and fear of blame in social work and social care so that practice (including management practice) is more positively oriented. One outcome of this collaboration was that Kent County Council co-funded a research studentship, now held by Jade Johns. The aim of her PhD research is to examine risk, decision-making and the exercise of discretion by practitioners.
Dr Warner is also currently collaborating with an international group of academics who all share an interest in risk and the human services across the three domains of mental health, children and families and criminal justice. The aim of the group is to look 'beyond the risk paradigm' in each of these three service domains and to develop a number of different strands of work to help effect change. One strand of their work will be a series of edited books.
At undergraduate level, Dr Warner teaches a module on research for social work practice. At postgraduate level she convenes the module 'Research and Dissertation' on the MA Social Work.
Dr Warner currently co-supervises PhD students undertaking research on a wide range of topics including:
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