Martha Bragin
Martha Bragin, PhD, LCSW is jointly appointed Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the Doctoral Program in Social Welfare at the Graduate Center and Chairperson of Global Social Work and Practice with Immigrants and Refugees. She joined the faculty after 25 years of experience supporting governments, non-governmental organizations and United Nations agencies to address the effects of violence and disaster on children, youth and families both in the US and internationally. She is a member of the IASC Reference Group (UN-NGO) on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings. Dr Bragin represents the International Association of Schools of Social Work before ECOSOC as part of the UN team and at the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Emergencies where she brings a social work perspective to standards on Community led Practice with Children in Emergencies as well as participatory methods in Assessment, Monitoring and Evaluation. She is also a member of the steering committee of the NASW New York City Immigration Committee.
Her recent research used participatory methods to develop locality-based indicators of psychosocial well-being for with people in countries in conflict, including Nepal, Burundi, Northern Uganda, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and North West Syria. Prior research looked at the development of indicators to validate the effectiveness of pilot programs to improve educational outcomes for children and adolescents affected by violence. Today she is leading a small phenomenological study to understand the effects of a time limited monthly guaranteed income on the lives of child welfare affected parents in the US.
To enhance her ability to do this work, beyond teaching and research, Dr. Bragin engages in local and international capacity sharing. She completed a 2-year collaboration with the Ministry of Higher Education in Afghanistan prior to the fall of the government in order to develop and strengthen Bachelor’s degree programs in Social Work and Counseling based on national curriculum research. The joint research conducted with those faculty members was awarded 2022 international social work paper of the year.
Her newest projects include a collaboration to develop a culturally responsive protocol for a US based - foster care agencies to assist them in working with and learning from diverse children and families, including recent immigrants and unaccompanied minors; as well as developing a manual for community based psychosocial support during humanitarian emergencies in collaboration with the International Organization for Migration. Dr. Bragin is the 2020 winner of the Partners in International Education award by the Council on Social Work Education for her work on decolonizing curricula. Her papers addressing the effects of structural, institutional, and interpersonal violence have won the prestigious Tyson Prize and Hayman Prize of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 2011 and 2021.
Her recent research used participatory methods to develop locality-based indicators of psychosocial well-being for with people in countries in conflict, including Nepal, Burundi, Northern Uganda, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and North West Syria. Prior research looked at the development of indicators to validate the effectiveness of pilot programs to improve educational outcomes for children and adolescents affected by violence. Today she is leading a small phenomenological study to understand the effects of a time limited monthly guaranteed income on the lives of child welfare affected parents in the US.
To enhance her ability to do this work, beyond teaching and research, Dr. Bragin engages in local and international capacity sharing. She completed a 2-year collaboration with the Ministry of Higher Education in Afghanistan prior to the fall of the government in order to develop and strengthen Bachelor’s degree programs in Social Work and Counseling based on national curriculum research. The joint research conducted with those faculty members was awarded 2022 international social work paper of the year.
Her newest projects include a collaboration to develop a culturally responsive protocol for a US based - foster care agencies to assist them in working with and learning from diverse children and families, including recent immigrants and unaccompanied minors; as well as developing a manual for community based psychosocial support during humanitarian emergencies in collaboration with the International Organization for Migration. Dr. Bragin is the 2020 winner of the Partners in International Education award by the Council on Social Work Education for her work on decolonizing curricula. Her papers addressing the effects of structural, institutional, and interpersonal violence have won the prestigious Tyson Prize and Hayman Prize of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 2011 and 2021.
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Publications by Martha Bragin
This chapter discusses best practices for clinical social work intervention following disaster and terrorism (see Appendix A). The purpose of this chapter is to compile, clarify, and discuss what has been learned in various countries and situations in order to integrate and build upon that knowledge to create opportunities for effective clinical response. Clinical social work principles and practice inform interventions that preserve well-being, support psychosocial development, and facilitate reconstruction as well as address mourning, loss, and care of the mentally ill. They do so by employing the biopsychosocial model that forms an essential unit of clinical social work analysis. This model uses an ecological framework to examine individual, biological, and intrapsychic life as it is situated in the sociocultural sphere. The chapter refers specifically to social ecological theories of resilience, psychodynamic theories that support resilience, as well as the new study of community resilience and the neurobiological principles that underpin it.
on their work, to be sure that it is completed
as intended, and to be clear as to whether and how it met expectations to improve MHPSS in aected communities. This process should allow for changes in activities and programmes, and support community learning about eective interventions for MHPSS, during the emergency and afterwards. Such a process creates additional opportunities
for community ownership and accountability to accompany institutional learning at the design and implementation levels.
They often come to treatment following enactments that make them appear tough, hardened and hard to reach, and which continue in the consulting room. When they are met with an official “trauma” narrative that explains their experience in political and psycho-educational terms they often find the experience alienating. They need to connect the world that they left, the world that live in now, and their own private experiences of love and hate in order to form an integrated identity.
This discussion explores aspects of the refugee narrative of psychoanalysis to help to illuminate the tasks necessary to co-create a meaningful narrative with refugee adolescent patients. It suggests ways to connect to the refugee experience and hear the young patients as they move between the political and the personal, the official and the familial, to understand themselves and return to the developmental task of creating an adult identity.
Addressing the treatment of children and adolescents affected by violent societies is a difficult one. The problem of combining family, community, and social healing with concern for the well-being of each affected child has been an intractable one in many countries, including the US. The Moral Third is a developmental concept that illustrates how a sense of the moral world is at the heart of psychic development. The paper proposes that this concept offers significant practical application to the treatment of young people affected by violence and the society that has injured them.
The author draws on global efforts to think about this work in countries experiencing armed conflict. She reviews theoretical contributions from Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa and their application to US populations. A case example from Sierra Leone illustrates the combined use of traditional healing with group work to create a space in which affected children, their caregivers, and communities could symbolize unspeakable experience and begin to heal. The paper connects the conceptual framework illustrated by this example with that of the Moral Third to suggest the creation of a way forward in which youngsters, their therapists and society might heal together.
Perhaps no situation has been so challenging as the massive displacement occurring in the Republic of South Sudan. Since conflict broke out in December, 2013 an estimated 2.2 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to mass violence. These circumstances caused people to take shelter in areas of apparent safety, such as the bases of UN peacekeepers, that were never designed to care for a large and ever-growing displaced population of men, women and children, all of whom are unable to leave for fear of physical, sexual violence or death. The term Protection of Civilian sites or PoCs, came into use to describe the bases being used as “temporary” shelter (Arenson, 2016). As of November 2016, the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) estimated that the six Protection of Civilians (PoC) sites were sheltering more than 220,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs), and the number appears to be growing (UNMISS, 2016).
This study sought to understand how to use the operational definitions provided by the populations to co-create relevant MHPSS programs at each level of the intervention pyramid and to develop a culture-sensitive indicator framework that can effectively evaluate the effectiveness of these programs in a participatory way.
The SEE_PET is designed to be part of a baseline program assessment, to develop indicators of program effectiveness against which a program can be assessed.
This chapter discusses clinical social work intervention following natural disasters and terrorism (see Appendix A).The purpose of the chapter is to compile, clarify, and discuss what has been learned in various countries and situations in order to integrate and build upon that knowledge to create opportunities for effective clinical response. Clinical social work theories inform interventions that preserve well-being, support psychosocial development, and facilitate reconstruction as well as address mourning, loss, and care of the mentally ill. They do so using the biopsychosocial model that forms an essential unit of clinical social work analysis, using an ecological framework to examine individual, biological, and intra- psychic life as it is situated in the sociocultural sphere. The chapter refers specifically to social ecological theories of resilience, psychodynamic theories that support resilience, as well as the new study of community resilience and the neurobiological principles that underpin it.
Sakcham II, located in the Makwanpur, Chitwan and Kapilvastu districts of Nepal, is one such program. It combines political empowerment, social action and economic empowerment components with community-based psychosocial supports, enabling poor women survivors of armed conflict to participate fully in the ongoing peace process. As part of the psychosocial component, a prior study was carried out to detail the factors that impinged upon psychosocial well-being (TPO & CARE, 2009).
The Sakcham program regularly evaluates the effectiveness of the components that support economic well-being and progress toward empowerment. However, it lacks the locally based indicators required to measure the effectiveness of the psychosocial component of the program. Therefore, this study was undertaken to find a valid method of establishing those indicators.
Today, interventions to support the psychological and social well-being of women survivors of armed conflict form an essential component of post-conflict humanitarian assistance (Ager, Ager, et al., 2011; IASC, 2007). However, the evidence base to determine the effectiveness of these interventions remains insubstantial (Wessells, 2009). Research literature has indicated that gathering the evidence requires indicators of psychosocial well-being defined by survivors themselves in cultural context. A number of studies have done this with conflict-affected children and adolescents (Ager, Ager, et al., 2011), but not with adult women.
This study engaged a carefully designed methodology to develop culturally sensitive indicators of psychosocial well-being among conflict-affected women. It was conducted in three countries: Burundi, Nepal and Northern Uganda in which CARE Österreich has been implementing a holistic programme called “Claiming Rights – Promoting Peace: Women’s Empowerment in Conflict-Affected Areas” financed by the Austrian Development Cooperation and Austrian private donors.1 This study is among the first to address psychosocial well-being, not as the absence of violence, but as a positive and aspirational state of being, in which poor, vulnerable, conflict-affected women defined for themselves the capacities and qualities they envision as needed to live a good life, now and in the future.
The Kirumara project, located in Bujumbura Rurale, Mpanda and Gitega districts of Burundi is one such program. It combines political empowerment, economic empowerment and family empowerment components with community-based psychosocial supports, in order to enable the participation of poor women survivors of armed conflict to participate fully in the ongoing peace process. The Kirumara project regularly evaluates the effectiveness of the components that support economic well-being and progress toward empowerment. In each of these evaluations, the project began a process of appreciative inquiry to ensure that the indicators were sensitive to the specific context of Burundi. This study represents the continuing effort to complete this process for the psychosocial component.
This chapter discusses best practices for clinical social work intervention following disaster and terrorism (see Appendix A). The purpose of this chapter is to compile, clarify, and discuss what has been learned in various countries and situations in order to integrate and build upon that knowledge to create opportunities for effective clinical response. Clinical social work principles and practice inform interventions that preserve well-being, support psychosocial development, and facilitate reconstruction as well as address mourning, loss, and care of the mentally ill. They do so by employing the biopsychosocial model that forms an essential unit of clinical social work analysis. This model uses an ecological framework to examine individual, biological, and intrapsychic life as it is situated in the sociocultural sphere. The chapter refers specifically to social ecological theories of resilience, psychodynamic theories that support resilience, as well as the new study of community resilience and the neurobiological principles that underpin it.
on their work, to be sure that it is completed
as intended, and to be clear as to whether and how it met expectations to improve MHPSS in aected communities. This process should allow for changes in activities and programmes, and support community learning about eective interventions for MHPSS, during the emergency and afterwards. Such a process creates additional opportunities
for community ownership and accountability to accompany institutional learning at the design and implementation levels.
They often come to treatment following enactments that make them appear tough, hardened and hard to reach, and which continue in the consulting room. When they are met with an official “trauma” narrative that explains their experience in political and psycho-educational terms they often find the experience alienating. They need to connect the world that they left, the world that live in now, and their own private experiences of love and hate in order to form an integrated identity.
This discussion explores aspects of the refugee narrative of psychoanalysis to help to illuminate the tasks necessary to co-create a meaningful narrative with refugee adolescent patients. It suggests ways to connect to the refugee experience and hear the young patients as they move between the political and the personal, the official and the familial, to understand themselves and return to the developmental task of creating an adult identity.
Addressing the treatment of children and adolescents affected by violent societies is a difficult one. The problem of combining family, community, and social healing with concern for the well-being of each affected child has been an intractable one in many countries, including the US. The Moral Third is a developmental concept that illustrates how a sense of the moral world is at the heart of psychic development. The paper proposes that this concept offers significant practical application to the treatment of young people affected by violence and the society that has injured them.
The author draws on global efforts to think about this work in countries experiencing armed conflict. She reviews theoretical contributions from Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa and their application to US populations. A case example from Sierra Leone illustrates the combined use of traditional healing with group work to create a space in which affected children, their caregivers, and communities could symbolize unspeakable experience and begin to heal. The paper connects the conceptual framework illustrated by this example with that of the Moral Third to suggest the creation of a way forward in which youngsters, their therapists and society might heal together.
Perhaps no situation has been so challenging as the massive displacement occurring in the Republic of South Sudan. Since conflict broke out in December, 2013 an estimated 2.2 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to mass violence. These circumstances caused people to take shelter in areas of apparent safety, such as the bases of UN peacekeepers, that were never designed to care for a large and ever-growing displaced population of men, women and children, all of whom are unable to leave for fear of physical, sexual violence or death. The term Protection of Civilian sites or PoCs, came into use to describe the bases being used as “temporary” shelter (Arenson, 2016). As of November 2016, the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) estimated that the six Protection of Civilians (PoC) sites were sheltering more than 220,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs), and the number appears to be growing (UNMISS, 2016).
This study sought to understand how to use the operational definitions provided by the populations to co-create relevant MHPSS programs at each level of the intervention pyramid and to develop a culture-sensitive indicator framework that can effectively evaluate the effectiveness of these programs in a participatory way.
The SEE_PET is designed to be part of a baseline program assessment, to develop indicators of program effectiveness against which a program can be assessed.
This chapter discusses clinical social work intervention following natural disasters and terrorism (see Appendix A).The purpose of the chapter is to compile, clarify, and discuss what has been learned in various countries and situations in order to integrate and build upon that knowledge to create opportunities for effective clinical response. Clinical social work theories inform interventions that preserve well-being, support psychosocial development, and facilitate reconstruction as well as address mourning, loss, and care of the mentally ill. They do so using the biopsychosocial model that forms an essential unit of clinical social work analysis, using an ecological framework to examine individual, biological, and intra- psychic life as it is situated in the sociocultural sphere. The chapter refers specifically to social ecological theories of resilience, psychodynamic theories that support resilience, as well as the new study of community resilience and the neurobiological principles that underpin it.
Sakcham II, located in the Makwanpur, Chitwan and Kapilvastu districts of Nepal, is one such program. It combines political empowerment, social action and economic empowerment components with community-based psychosocial supports, enabling poor women survivors of armed conflict to participate fully in the ongoing peace process. As part of the psychosocial component, a prior study was carried out to detail the factors that impinged upon psychosocial well-being (TPO & CARE, 2009).
The Sakcham program regularly evaluates the effectiveness of the components that support economic well-being and progress toward empowerment. However, it lacks the locally based indicators required to measure the effectiveness of the psychosocial component of the program. Therefore, this study was undertaken to find a valid method of establishing those indicators.
Today, interventions to support the psychological and social well-being of women survivors of armed conflict form an essential component of post-conflict humanitarian assistance (Ager, Ager, et al., 2011; IASC, 2007). However, the evidence base to determine the effectiveness of these interventions remains insubstantial (Wessells, 2009). Research literature has indicated that gathering the evidence requires indicators of psychosocial well-being defined by survivors themselves in cultural context. A number of studies have done this with conflict-affected children and adolescents (Ager, Ager, et al., 2011), but not with adult women.
This study engaged a carefully designed methodology to develop culturally sensitive indicators of psychosocial well-being among conflict-affected women. It was conducted in three countries: Burundi, Nepal and Northern Uganda in which CARE Österreich has been implementing a holistic programme called “Claiming Rights – Promoting Peace: Women’s Empowerment in Conflict-Affected Areas” financed by the Austrian Development Cooperation and Austrian private donors.1 This study is among the first to address psychosocial well-being, not as the absence of violence, but as a positive and aspirational state of being, in which poor, vulnerable, conflict-affected women defined for themselves the capacities and qualities they envision as needed to live a good life, now and in the future.
The Kirumara project, located in Bujumbura Rurale, Mpanda and Gitega districts of Burundi is one such program. It combines political empowerment, economic empowerment and family empowerment components with community-based psychosocial supports, in order to enable the participation of poor women survivors of armed conflict to participate fully in the ongoing peace process. The Kirumara project regularly evaluates the effectiveness of the components that support economic well-being and progress toward empowerment. In each of these evaluations, the project began a process of appreciative inquiry to ensure that the indicators were sensitive to the specific context of Burundi. This study represents the continuing effort to complete this process for the psychosocial component.