Collection: Critical and Radical Social Work Editors’ Choice
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Editors' Choice Collection Critical and Radical Social Work
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In recent decades, a lot of Western countries have been engaged in a heated debate on how to come to terms with their colonial past. Leaving behind the idea that colonial history consists mainly of common achievements, the former philanthropic narrative of ‘modernisation’ and ‘progress’ has been critically analysed and dissected as the awareness of its painful episodes grew. In this vein, the postcolonial history in Belgium is an interesting case to examine, as it has long been one of the most criticised colonial metropoles for the way in which it deals with its colonial past, precisely because Belgium has persisted in focusing on the positive aspect of that past. Consequently, a whole part of this history has not yet been processed and is mainly part of a contested past. Social work practices have long sought to remain neutral in this discussion, but this awareness of history as a dynamic weaving of a multiplicity of different strands of identity also applies directly to the development of social work as a profession. From a social work perspective, it is impossible to retreat into a viewpoint outside of history, as we must become aware that social work practices are deeply embedded in historical and cultural habits from which we cannot disengage. In this article, we argue that social work needs to critically deal with its own confusing history, with which it is interwoven, in order to be able to clarify what contemporary social work represents.
In times of repeated crises, social work is more than ever linked with politics. In contemporary societies, neoliberal welfare, health policies (such as the case of COVID-19), climate change, poverty and wars have a direct impact on people and nature, as well as social services, professionals and users. Particularly in regard to climate change, we need to accentuate its implication for people’s lives, animals and nature, as well as its connection with social work. In this direction, this article presents the findings of research that took place in 2019 in Greece regarding social work practice in disasters and suggests the reclaiming of community work by a radical perspective and in coalition with environmental justice movements.
This study reveals tensions between Jews and Arabs in the Israeli Social Workers’ Union, examining the characteristics, experiences and functioning of the Arab minority representatives over the years until the recent election of a new radical socialist-feminist leadership. Data were elicited from semi-structured in-depth interviews with Arab delegates to the union. It was found that the policies of the union’s institutions discriminate against Arab social workers in three dimensions: (1) under-representation in all its organs, including participation in paid staff in the headquarters and district offices; (2) lack of attention to Arab workers’ voice in the union’s published platforms; and (3) lack of consideration of Arab social workers’ unique needs in programmes more appropriate for Jews. The union fails in its role as the formal and exclusive representative of Arab social workers, who suffer from discriminatory government consideration, including unequal budgeting, lack of recognition and lack of participation in decision making.
This article is concerned with the employment of pathologising discourses of mental health and trauma by the mainstream media as they pertain to the treatment of migrants in detention in Canada. Using critical discourse analysis, this research contrasts mainstream media coverage of four major publications on immigration detention. It explores the media’s role in the (re)creation of refugee discourse, and as a purveyor of racial ideology, which problematises people of colour and demands state intervention in the form of mental health aid. The resulting discourse pathologises the refugee identity and simultaneously obscures the socio-political conditions and violence that necessitates their departure from their home countries. As refugee discourse is infused with biomedical understandings of mental health, it also legitimises the nation state’s practice of coercive social control for these populations through detention.
In the absence of a national Palestinian state and in response to the oppressive daily practices of the British Mandate government, the Israeli settlers’ colonial occupation and the Arab governments that ruled the West Bank and Gaza between 1950 and 1967, the Palestinian community has had to create and develop a set of indigenous resilience strategies. Muslih (1993) and Faraj (2017) refer to all these strategies as ‘A’mal Ejtima’y’, or ‘popular social work’, characterised by collectivism, public participation and non-hierarchical design, which has played a role in mobilising masses and facilitating youth engagement in the decolonisation process. Despite more than a century of existence of this form of social work in Palestine, it has received marginal or no attention from formal social work education and research. Recent years have witnessed some indications of the ‘resurrection’ of community social work in its very popular version.
Reproductive justice is essential in the struggle to remove health inequalities. Currently, escalating threats to reproductive rights are rarely discussed in contemporary social work literature. Discomfort in the profession about addressing challenges to abortion rights exposes a lack of courage to treat abortion as essential healthcare. A case study of several abortion-focused articles and chapters reveals a strand of ambivalence about taking a progressive stance on abortion. Recent trends demonstrate that reproductive rights cannot be taken for granted. Even when law reform removes some of the barriers to safe, legal abortion, abortion stigma and anti-choice harassment remain potent threats to reproductive autonomy. A case is made for reproductive justice to be central in our drive for health equality. This requires a feminist perspective, moving away from seeing women as merely the object of the social work gaze, too often the focus of scrutiny and judgement.
