- Title
- Towards a 'new politics' of social work
- Creator
- Gray, Mel; Webb, Stephen A.
- Relation
- The New Politics of Social Work p. 3-20
- Relation
- http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-new-politics-of-social-work-mel-gray/?K=9780230296787
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- Collectively, the contributors to this book seek to devise a 'new politics' for social work in the belief that it bears a public responsibility to confront injustice while seeking justice for all. While the chapters which follow speak for themselves, and deliberately, do not speak in the same voice, we explicitly adopt justice as a normative value. The point, of course, is partly exhortatory, a call to social workers to take a stance, but partly a matter of necessity in defining how this might be mobilized. A new politics involves redefining the project of the Left in social work in terms of a 'radicalization' of theory and practice. This requires a militancy which confronts the system of capitalist power that redefines, limits and rejects the core values of social work. These ultimately are the central objectives of a renewed social work politics, which begins with grappling with ideas about what a 'just society' might look like and how injustice manifests itself in everyday relationships and institutional structures. This political project confronts, unsettles and agitates, and seeks to transform capitalist relations of domination, oppression, marginalization and exclusion that lead to injustice. Critical social work is the primary method for framing a new politics of social work with its conceptual and historical tools significantly informing our perspective on a new politics. However, there has been a proliferation of post-Marxist perspectives that have moved us beyond critical social work, freeing social work up from its postmodern influences and reconfiguring it more closely with the Frankfurt School Marxist traditions. Moreover, contemporary political mobilization through new social movements in a post-global financial crisis scenario has significantly changed responses to the neoliberal juggernaut and welfare austerity, seen inter alia with the Occupy Movement, the Turkish protesters in Taksim Square, the Greek resurgence of the Left and the Arab Spring. Although the inspiration for this book falls within the critical and radical tradition described by Bob Pease in Chapter 2, our notion of a new politics encompasses new perspectives and issues within the contemporary political environment of social activism.
- Subject
- politics; critical social work; justice; equality
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1054646
- Identifier
- uon:15779
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780230296787
- Language
- eng
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