Re Imagining Social Work

Reimagining Anti-Oppression Social Work Research explores the challenges, tensions, and possibilities of engaging with anti-oppression epistemology in social work research. Through in-depth discussion of methodologies such as phenomenology, surveys, decolonizing research principles, autoethnography, and critical arts-informed research, the authors provide insights about the application of these approaches to studies with marginalized populations and on a variety of social issues. Outlining principles for engaging with communities, research in organizational contexts, and the importance of fluidity and practices of unknowing, this edited collection invites readers to reflect critically about research frameworks. The authors explore the complexities of research on topics such as whiteness, racism, disability, and trans experiences, as well as working within feminist contexts and institutional social service settings. An ideal resource for social work students and scholars, this insightful and highly accessible volume highlights the value of anti-oppressive research for social change.

Re-imagining Social Work provides a unique perspective on how social work can evolve for the future.

Thought-provoking and engaging, this edited volume invites readers to examine how anti-oppression practices can be fostered as a platform for transformation within social work education and organizational settings. Written by practitioners, educators, and students who have long engaged with anti-oppression and social justice frameworks, the chapters in this collection offer in-depth insights into how anti-oppression principles can enhance social work practice. Through supportive critiques and an exploration of the complexities of practice with and by marginalized populations, the authors seek to push the scope and boundaries of anti-oppression practice. They offer concrete examples on a diversity of issues, including developing Indigenous practice principles, addressing anti-Black sanism, challenging normative constructions of grief, supporting queer resistance, and advancing critical practices with children and youth. A well-timed contribution to the literature, this edited collection will be an indispensable resource for social work students, scholars, and practitioners.

This book challenges the current child protection culture and calls for family-minded humane practice where children are understood as relational beings, parents are recognized as people with needs and hopes and families as carrying extraordinary capacities for care and protection.

This book helps professionals find new ways to foster trust and collaboration. Rethinking providing and receiving services in child welfare, addiction treatment, mental health, doctoring, palliative care, and more, it proves through everyday examples that these goals cannot be met without quality, interpersonal interaction.

Taking a new and innovative angle on social work, this book seeks to remedy the lack of holistic perspectives currently used in Western social work practice by exploring Indigenous and other culturally diverse understandings and experiences of healing. This book examines six core areas of healing through a holistic lens that is grounded in a decolonizing perspective. Situating integrative healing within social work education and theory, the book takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from social memory and historical trauma, contemplative traditions, storytelling, healing literatures, integrative health, and the traditional environmental knowledge of Indigenous Peoples. In exploring issues of water, creative expression, movement, contemplation, animals, and the natural world in relation to social work practice, the book will appeal to all scholars, practitioners, and community members interested in decolonization and Indigenous studies.

In Reimagining Social Medicine from the South, Abigail H. Neely explores social medicine's possibilities and limitations at one of its most important origin sites: the Pholela Community Health Centre (PCHC) in South Africa. The PCHC's focus on medical and social factors of health yielded remarkable success. And yet South Africa's systemic racial inequality hindered health center work, and witchcraft illnesses challenged a program rooted in the sciences. To understand Pholela's successes and failures, Neely interrogates the “social” in social medicine. She makes clear that the social sciences the PCHC used failed to account for the roles that Pholela's residents and their environment played in the development and success of its program. At the same time, the PCHC's reliance on biomedicine prevented it from recognizing the impact on health of witchcraft illnesses and the social relationships from which they emerged. By rewriting the story of social medicine from Pholela, Neely challenges global health practitioners to recognize the multiple worlds and actors that shape health and healing in Africa and beyond.