With your hosts: Dr. Sarah Lonbay and Dr. Lesley Deacon

When working in frontline practice having the time for, and access to, current research can be difficult. Join Dr Sarah Lonbay and Dr Lesley Deacon as they interview researchers about how their work can be used to inform and develop social work practice. The show is for anyone who is interested in social work and for anyone who wants to keep up to date with the latest research and use this to inform their practice. The Portal Podcast explores the work of a different social sciences researcher in each episode and aims to support people to access, understand, and make use of research.

In this episode Dr. Donna Peaock stepped in to co-host with Sarah so that we could speak to Lesley about her paper, ‘A neoliberalist solution for a neoliberalist problem: The neoliberal normalisation of psychosocial support for parent-carers’, co-authored with Philip Nicholson and Kim Allen (this paper and Lesley's other work is available to view the University of Sunderland's research repository, SURE).

Lesley’s paper (and this podcast episode) focuses on the impact of austerity measures on social care and in particular on women and mothers. We discussed the term ‘parent-carer’ as a contested label, the neoliberalisation of care, responsibiliation, and what it means to be a ‘good neoliberal citizen’. As always these discussions were brought back to practice and the conversation also touched on critical and reflective practice as well as Lesley’s model of ‘Faciltated Practice-Based Research’. Some useful points for social work practice were raised in this conversation and we hope you enjoy listening.

The music is called “Together We’re Stronger” by All Music Seven (All7 Studios). Production and editing by PaperGhosts.

The Portal Podcast is funded by the University of Sunderland.