Criminology - Theses, Dissertations, and other Required Graduate Degree Essays

Social workers play a key, but unacknowledged role regarding end-of-life decisions. The dearth of research on social workers’ attitudes toward assisted death is in stark contrast to the abundance of research on assisted death involving health care practitioners. Through analysis of data collected on members of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) in 1998, this research examines attitudes of social workers toward assisted death (AD) including both voluntary euthanasia (VE) and assisted suicide (AS). Several hypotheses are developed from the available literature on assisted death involving social work and medical practice. The quantitative data are supplemented with written responses by BASW members. There is variation between social workers’ support of AD by country. English social workers are the most supportive, followed by Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland social workers. As a group, social workers support legalizing VE (72%) and AS (72.5%). A majority of social workers (69%) endorsed the Dutch model of legalized euthanasia. A minority of social workers (25%) indicated that they would report a colleague they suspected was involved in an assisted death. Catholics were less supportive of legalizing assisted death and the Dutch model of euthanasia but, regardless of religion, most social workers respect their clients’ wishes regarding end-of-life choices. Although less than 50% of social workers want to be involved in the decision-making making process with clients, over 65% indicated a willingness to engage in policy development regarding assisted death. Given their position, policy development is essential for social workers to be effective in end-of-life care. The theoretical perspective guiding the research shows that social workers support medico-ethical principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-malfeasance and social justice in assisted death. This finding places social workers in an important position regarding care of the dying. Future research should include the development and test of a collaborative model of training for all practitioners working with those facing end-of-life decisions. As a profession, social work must prepare itself for the challenges posed by growing populations of persons facing end-of-life decisions.

Police-citizen encounters in late modern society occur as the enactment of a bureaucratic approach to human predicaments. Police praxis depends upon the ability to translate these complex situations into bureaucratically resolvable "problems." This process of translation is part of the overall interpretation of experience, whereby meanings are created and ascribed to a given moment. The creation of meaning inherent to any kind of praxis is understandable as an elemental form of poetry. This poetic aspect of praxis represents the existential intersection of experience with the specific ontological first principles that provide the basis for its interpretation. In the case of bureaucratic praxis, such as policing, these principles enable the problematization of human being, whereby human presence becomes meaningful through its reification as abstract subjectivity. The underlying ontology of bureaucratic problematization exists in parallel form in the approach of mainstream social scientific praxis. Hence, the two forms of praxis are essentially interrelated. While the dissertation's immediate focus is upon the analysis of the ontological foundations of bureaucratic police praxis, it further represents a philosophical engagement with the disciplinary self-conception of criminology. The dissertation pursues these intersecting goals using the approach of a phenomenological aesthetics of encounter. The guiding thesis of a phenomenological aesthetics of encounter holds that the ontological foundations of praxis may be disclosed using aesthetic forms to reveal aspects of human presence, which are otherwise overlooked in the selfinterpretations of everyday action, and their second-order interpretations by mainstream social science. The dissertation presents narratives of police-citizen encounters, drawn from the author's professional experiences in policing, and interprets them through the juxtaposition of aesthetic representations of encounter, which are chosen from several genres, and used to illuminate aspects of human presence that are effaced when it is approached as an abstract, reified "problem." These reflections upon the ontological foundations of praxis and their enactment in policing lead to an explanation of the inherently self-subverting nature of the bureaucratic approach to human predicaments, and of allied approaches in mainstream criminology. If it is truly to progress, praxis must develop critical knowledge of its underlying first principles.