EDITORIAL

The readership of the Journal continued to grow over 2006 and a flow of diverse and high quality submissions has been maintained. We believe that the contemporary importance of psychosocial perspectives is now solidly established within social work and allied professions. Psychosocial approaches necessarily entail a strong practice focus and in the UK they have in many places been installed as a core component of social work education curricula. They naturally extend to inter-professional work and their influence is being widely felt in defining the research agenda. A rising number of overseas submissions suggests that similar processes may be at work beyond the UK and the Journal is fortunate to have secured the collaboration of three new corresponding editors: Linda Davies from McGill University, Canada; Linda Andersen from Roskilde University, Denmark; and Mechthild Bereswill from the University of Hannover, Germany. It is planned that inaugural events will help to extend the work of the Journal in the countries they represent and we look forward to publishing single papers and collections from these arenas. The continued internationalisation of the Journal is a mark of its quality and an essential factor in its growing influence. In addition, the Journal has strong links with a number of specialist units in the UK, in particular The University of Central Lancashire Psychosocial Research Unit and The University of East London/Tavistock Centre for Social Research. These two institutions are hosting an Economic and Social Research Council sponsored seminar series over the next two years on ‘Practitioner Research and Practice-Near Methods’. Success in securing funding for this series is undoubtedly due to the pressing importance of establishing a research and practice culture which are mutually compatible and supportive of imaginative and innovative intervention and rigorous standards. The Journal of Social Work Practice will play a major part in the publication of outputs from these seminars. Our overall aim is to place the Journal at the service of a psychosocially literate international dialogue that — in accordance with our wellestablished traditions — bridges the perennial gap between practitioners and the academy. The collection of papers in this issue reflects concern with the conditions of practice, practice congruent research and the internationalisation of these agenda. The first is a provocative and well-theorised paper which offers an interesting perspective on remembering for survivors of sexual abuse. Reliance on accurate recall amongst this group has been the subject of considerable controversy in recent years, not least in relation to the forensic implications of ‘recovered memory’. Paula Reavey and Steven Brown consider remembering to be always an act of interpretation against the backcloth of a cultural landscape where survivors experience ambivalence about their own and others’ moral responsibility. They argue that while a literalist understanding of the relationship between memory and past events is problematic, so too is any assumption that memory is merely part of an individual process of constituting a coherent self. Instead, ‘social remembering’ aids the individual in the ethical work of selectivity and stabilises collective memories by ‘implacing’ them in the environment and on bodies. The physical environment thus holds social memories and acts back on