Feminist Visions For Social Work

Demonstrates how feminist visions can help social workers provide more holistic, ecological, and prevention-oriented services. An essential text for practitioners, educators and students.

This book explores the development of truly feminist social work, setting out the progress to date in establishing a feminist presence in the four central areas of social work: the definition of social problems for intervention, therapy and counselling, statutory social work and community action. Showing how progress in one area fosters the others, the authors also examine why it is crucial to ensure that feminist issues inform working relations and political organisations.

In this timely study, Batra examines contemporary drama from India, Jamaica, and Nigeria in conjunction with feminist and incipient queer movements in these countries. Postcolonial drama, Batra contends, furthers the struggle for gender justice in both these movements by contesting the idea of the heterosexual, middle class, wage-earning male as the model citizen and by suggesting alternative conceptions of citizenship premised on working-class sexual identities. Further, Batra considers the possibility of Indian, Jamaican, and Nigerian drama generating a discourse on a rights-bearing conception of citizenship that derives from representations of non-biological, non-generational forms of kinship. Her study is one of the first to examine the ways in which postcolonial dramatists are creating the possibility of a dialogue between cultural activism, women’s movements, and an emerging discourse on queer sexualities.

Demonstrates how feminist visions can help social workers provide more holistic, ecological, and prevention-oriented services. An essential text for practitioners, educators and students.

Feminist theories of social work have been criticised in recent years for treating women as a uniform category and displaying insufficient sensitivity to the complex ways in which other social divisions (those of race, age, disability, etc.) impact on gender relations. This major text by a leading writer in the field seeks to develop a new framework for feminist social work that takes on board postmodernist arguments to do with difference and power yet retains a commitment to collective solidarity and social change. As such, it will be essential reading for students, educators and practitioners alike in social work.

Key issues in gender studies and development today are explored in detail, from rural and urban poverty to population and family planning, resulting from the 1995 UN Conference on Women.

This invaluable guidebook accomplishes what many others on feminist theory do not. It reviews both the theories and the applications of the field. Too frequently, books and articles tend to focus on one or two ways for practicing feminism, when, in reality, different problems, different groups of women, and different goals may require a different theory for guiding objectiveness, strategies, and work style. Using the wrong theory for a particular group or problem may backfire, causing unexpected outcomes. This book circumvents such unforeseen results. Feminist Theories and Social Work reviews the most important theories of today, evaluates the contributions and limitations of each branch, and for each theory, provides application examples at several levels of intervention.