The Development of Social Work Practice with Lesbians and Gay Men.

The process involved in deciding to submit my publications for examination for a PhD by Published Works' has been a peculiar one. The peculiarity has been the separateness of the two endeavours, namelyihewriting of the publications and
the submission for a PhD. When I wrote each of the submitted publications the idea that they would become part of a PhD submission had not occurred to me.
They were publications primarily for practice, with the hoped for intention of improving practice and practice outcomes for service users. They were written during the last ten years during the time that I had entered academia and had become a hybrid academic/practitioner. The 'research' process involved in the publications was inductive; the writing was the culmination of ten years in social work practice as a social worker and as a team leader of a generic team in an
-inner-L-ondon-socral-servrees -department during the'decade of the 1980s. The writing was a synthesis of my reflections on practice experience and literature reviews, the culmination of which were the submitted publications. The submitted
works fall within what Fullerand Petch-refer tCfas"'practitionerrese-arch' -(Fuller and Petch, 1995) and what Buchanan refers to as 'practice experience'
(Buchanan, 1999). The publications, at the time, were a record of my practice experience, reflections, contribution to and learning from practice, a way of giving back' something to my colleagues and my clients of ten years. However,
even though my intentions when writing the publications did not include a PhD, here I am writing my ~ntext statement with the pursuit of a PhD as the goal in mind. This has involved considerable reflective critical analysis about the
1 processes and thinking I engaged in, in relation to each publication and the body of work as a whole. It has also involved analysis of myself as the researcher and my part in the creation of 'knowledge'. The 'reflexive journey' involved in this submission has helped me position my work but also to some extent myself and has helped me feel slightly less antagonistically ambivalent to the role of academic.