An Object Lesson

Mindful of discourse on here once more becoming somewhat ill-tempered and ill-considered, I found myself in conversation with a long-standing colleague yesterday and was pointed in the direction of an interesting article published in issue 17 of Probation Quarterly from 2020. It made me think and reflect and I hope it might for others as well:-  

Probation in Objects

Andrew Fowler and Tom Brown introduce the thinking behind their new research.

Objects can tell a story. While sometimes practical, they can be evocative and laden with emotions, entertaining or representing deeper meaning to the owner. They can be metaphorical, - ‘spinning plates’ at one time to represent multitasking, for example. An object can also be a gift. Of course, objects can be all these things at once. One of us became aware of the significance of objects in relation to professional identity and occupational culture while working in prison as a newly qualified probation officer. A prisoner remarked on the notebook I carried around: ‘You must be from probation, you all carry notebooks.’ This notebook was for recording information and represented the mantra from my probation training, ‘if it’s not written down it didn’t happen.’ To me it represented safety, an object to hold in an unpredictable environment, accountability, capturing a voice, social justice, accuracy, trustworthiness, the desire to do a good job and, in time, a historical account of people I had worked with in prison. I started to reflect on what objects revealed about probation culture or identity and the history of probation. 

These ideas are not new. We think of Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, Sherry Turkles’s Evocative Objects and, perhaps most relevant to this discussion, Mark Doel’s Social Work in 42 Objects. Whilst MacGregor’s descriptive work searches for objects to tell a history of the world, Sherry Turkle’s (2008:5) Evocative Objects seeks to provoke thoughts about identity and describes objects as ‘companions to our emotional lives.’ Doel’s research draws on Turkle and MacGregor’s work considering identity in the profession of social work. Doel suggested that a collection of objects can say something about the identity and history of the profession to counter public ignorance about social work (socialworkin40objects.com). 

There are already excellent histories of probation which tell us about the origins and development of approaches to practice. But might it also be possible to represent the history of probation in a way that has not been attempted before?

What can objects tell us about probation workers’ personal histories and their time in probation? What can the accumulated objects tell us about the identity of probation work? What would an exhibition of probation objects, selected by people working in probation reveal? 

Probation Context 

The probation service has historically been described as the ‘Cinderella service’ (Robinson 2016), never invited to the ball to represent itself at policy level and suffering from invisibility in the penal field. It has experienced a tumult of change following the controversial ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ reforms since 2013. Facing further re-structuring following the government’s 2019 white paper ‘Strengthening Probation, Building Confidence’, probation workers are going to experience yet another period of change. The government plan to amend the reforms and the supervision of all people on probation will be renationalised. Research following the reforms by the National Audit Office (2016) pronounced that morale was low across the National Probation Service and Community Rehabilitation Companies. This echoed findings from Kirton and Guilliame (2015: 25) that staff felt there was a ‘lack of inclusion, staff feeling unvalued, uncertainty, lack of consultation and low morale.’ A focus on objects could capture the diversity of staff and roles contribute to giving probation workers a different kind of creative voice. 

Probation culture and objects 

When considering whether an abstract concept like ‘probation work’ can be represented by concrete objects, arguably a single object will not do justice to the diversity of staff and roles in the profession, whereas a collection of objects might elucidate a rich and more inclusive picture. Probation work is a contested issue and even the title of the people undertaking the work is contested, with some preferring ‘Probation Officer’ over ‘Offender Manager’.

The Confederation of European Probation states that probation: 

…relates to the implementation in the community of sanctions and measures, defined by law and imposed on an offender. It includes a range of activities and interventions, which involve supervision, guidance and assistance aiming at the social inclusion of an offender, as well as at contributing to community safety (CEP 2019). 

It is even less simple to describe probation culture: what the work means to staff. And perhaps it is even harder to identify visual symbols connected to the work. Mawby and Worrall (2013) identify cultural characteristics in probation under five headings: motivation, artefacts, job satisfaction, meaning and (re) presentation. Following their interviews with over 60 probation officers they note that in relation to artefacts as cultural characteristics there is a lack of ‘visual cultural symbols’ (2013: 141). They lament that the prison, courts and police have clear visual symbols while probation has nothing comparable to the police helmet, uniform or gadgetry, the prison officer’s keys or the court’s architecture or wigs. 

Probation and visual methodologies 

Research considering identity in probation practice has mainly involved semi-structured qualitative interviews (see Robinson and Svensson 2014). In cultural criminology, there is a growing use and recognition of visual methods in research. The Routledge Handbook of Visual Criminology (Brown and Carrabine 2017), for example, is an anthology of the use of imagery in criminology. There are two chapters that address the visual in probation, the first by Worrall, Carr and Robinson, the second by Fitzgibbon, Graebsch and McNeill. The former involved photovoice and probation officers taking photographs of their working environment. This was to elicit discussion to open a window on the environment where probation supervision took place. The latter involves photo-elicitation. This project was interested in how people experience supervision and asked participants to photograph their experiences which were then discussed with the researchers. In probation research, Healy and Fitzgibbon (2018) present some of the benefits of a visual approach, in Supervisible. Their research into experiences of probation supervision using photo-elicitation allow researchers to step into another person’s lived reality. Using photography allows the researcher to elicit new information not captured previously using verbal methods. The use of photographs can also be seen as truly collaborative with the research population by empowering experts in the field and co-researchers to represent what probation means to them (see Fitzgibbon and Stengel’s research with women, 2018). 

Conclusions 

The curated objects in Doel’s Social Work in 42 Objects represent metaphor, personal, practical, historical and the socio-political. Many objects cut across categories. For example, the theme ‘tools of the trade’ included a picture of juggling balls, which represented the metaphor of keeping many balls in the air, but also an aid to managing stress. 

The theme of ‘social work on the move’ included a car. This was a car the participant had owned since training, where they had reflected, laughed, cried and used as an office. The theme of ‘documenting social work’ included the Magna Carta, a cartoon image, the mental health act, guidance and the cartoon strip of ‘Clare in the Community.’ 

Similarly, we have started research to tell a story about probation practice from the photographs of objects. We will act as curators, classifying and grouping the submitted objects with the accompanying descriptions from practitioners.

We will build on and borrow from Mark Doel’s research: 

If this were a physical exhibition of artefacts, various rooms would house collections of objects illustrating different themes; in this spirit I set about arranging the objects into smaller collections (Doel 2017:7).

Following Doel’s approach we will arrange the objects in smaller collections along themes that emerge and will post the results on a blog site. Doel’s work reveals a rich, textured, colourful culture in social work through the objects submitted. He argues that this is to ‘give expression to what social work thinks it is and ‘stand up for social work’ (2017:9). We are planning to do something similar for probation work. 

Andrew Fowler and Tom Brown

Sheffield Hallam University

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Probation in Objects website:-

About

‘Probation in Objects’ is our research in which participants provide a visual representation (object) of how they feel about their experiences of the Probation Service. Through this collective effort, we want to capture the significance of ‘Probation’ in the United Kingdom and internationally from those who have lived it. These are exceptional times, with the reformation of probation in England and Wales and the global impact of the pandemic. This reminds us of the importance of recording shared experiences for past, current and future generations.

This project builds on the excellent work by Mark Doel, who inspired our research with his book Social Work in 40 Objects. Please visit Mark’s site for inspiration: Social Work in 40 Objects

You can read about our project in issue 17, 2020 of the Probation Quarterly, by the Probation Institute: Probation in Objects in the Probation Quarterly