Emotions, Marital Conflict and Affect in the Multicultural Social Welfare Encounter.

Informed by the multidisciplinary scholarship on emotions and the emotional labour performed by human services workers, this paper examines how institutions involved in the integration of migrants intervened in their subjects’ intimate lives. The focus is on the affective dimension of social welfare encounters that occurred in multicultural contexts shaped by renewed migration and a consolidated welfare state. Drawing on 100 confidential cases of marital conflict produced by the counsellors and caseworkers of a major post-1945 social welfare agency in heavily immigrant Toronto, Canada, the paper examines the frontline activities of liberal pluralist social workers, mainly women, but also men, who were themselves newcomers managing their own emotions, and their clients. It draws on relevant feminist scholarship in order to assess the many similarities and key differences in the range of narratives and scenarios contained in the files. However, the main contribution involves scrutinising the ‘emotional’ quality of caseworker–client encounters involving domestic disputes that did not appear to involve male physical violence, thereby highlighting the bonds of trust that sometimes developed between immigrant female counsellors and immigrant wife-assault victims. The paper also considers the emotional costs incurred by immigrant female social-work practitioners handling weighty and emotionally demanding caseloads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]