Ai and the Disruption of Welfare: Challenges for Social Work Education and Practice

This book with 22 chapters from eminent scholars focuses on the role of AI-enabled technology in surveillance and coercive ‘welfare’, bringing into view how advanced technology is used to shift the boundaries between welfare, penal, and carceral state and its very real impact on social work education and practice.

It focuses on the way emerging digital technologies, often combined under the heading Artificial Intelligence (AI), are fundamentally changing our lifeworld and the social and economic divisions within it. These technologies, which dominate every aspect of our lives, harbour tremendous emancipatory potential. However, they also create a digital infrastructure that can and has been used as a new instrument of oppression. Contributors to this book seek to uncover and understand how new digital technologies are used in ways that lead to new vulnerabilities and oppressive outcomes that affect the welfare state, social workers, and their clients. Contributors to this book are located across the globe in countries with vastly different welfare regimes that bring into view not only considerable limitations but also a breadth of possibilities for emancipatory social work.

It will be of interest to all scholars, students, and professionals working in social work and social community services.

Goetz Ottmann, PhD, is a senior lecturer at Federation University, Melbourne. He is the author of five books, numerous book chapters, and many reports and peer-reviewed journal articles.

Carolyn Noble, PhD, is a Professor Emerita at ACAP, Sydney, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of several books and many book chapters and peer-reviewed articles.