As mentioned in my last post, we are looking forward to our first annual SRV Journal online conference which will open in September. Why are we hosting this conference? We believe that Social Role Valorization (SRV), when well applied, has great potential to help societally devalued groups and individuals to gain greater access to the ‘good things of life,’ and to be spared at least some of the negative effects (‘wounds’) of social devaluation. One of our major purposes in hosting this online conference is to foster, extend and deepen dialogue about, and understanding of, SRV.
We believe that informed and open discussions of SRV, and even constructive debates about it, can only help to promote its dissemination, significance and application.( This was one of the lessons which Wolfensberger taught us by his own example of engaging in writing, publication, written dialogue with other thinkers and writers, and so on.) Therefore, we encourage people with a range of experience with SRV to contribute papers to this online conference hosted by the SRV Journal and the SRV Implementation Project. We invite papers from those in a variety of roles and from a variety of human services.
We do expect that contributors will have at least some basic understanding of the key ideas and goals of SRV, gained for example by studying relevant resources, taking a university course during which SRV materials were studied, attending a multi-day SRV workshop, and so on. In a future post, we will list some of these learning opportunities and resources. We are particularly interested in receiving submissions from family members, friends and servers of societally devalued people who are trying to put the ideas of SRV into practice, even if they do not consider themselves as writers or conference presenters.
We invite your help in beginning to shape this online conference. Below is a beginning list of examples of submission topics, to get the ball rolling, but we encourage you to reply to this post with other ideas and suggestions for SRV relevant topics. Topics might include for example:
- SRV as relevant to a wide variety of human services; and in different locales around the world
- descriptions and analyses of social devaluation and wounding
- descriptions and analyses of the impact(s) of valued social roles
- illustrations of particular SRV themes
- research into and development of the theory of SRV and its particular themes
- analysis of new developments (e.g., in human services) from an SRV perspective
- success stories, as well as struggles and lessons learned, in trying to implement SRV
- book or movie reviews and notices from an SRV perspective
- reasoned, informed and constructive debate around SRV
Marc Tumeinski