Human Behavior in the Environment: A Justice for Vulnerable Populations Approach

Social workers prioritize understanding and advocating for unjustly at-risk vulnerable populations. Honoring this moral imperative requires critical empathy, imagination, knowledge, theorizing, and action.

This textbook provides a comprehensive, practical, and normative framework for assessing a population with a problem in a place, for using standards of justice to appraise "what is", "what could be" (ideals), and "what should be" (norms), and for using the (in)justice profile as a foundation for planning transformative interventions. Focusing on marginalized and vulnerable populations, it shows their differential exposure to hazardous intersections and perilous paths, and the consequential harms they often suffer. Expanding on Nancy Fraser’s multi-theory, multidimensional justice paradigm, topics covered include the grounds of social work’s justice imperative; the forms of injustice-recognition denial, resource deprivation, representation deficiencies, and rights violations; environmental injustice and the ecosystems perspective; risks and protectors; creative agency, resistance, and well-being; privilege and penalty; resiliency and vulnerability; and plausible explanations. It also includes content on pivotal social systems; the intersectional life course perspective and other critical theories of inequity; processes of injustice including blaming, dominating, exploiting, stereotyping, and stigmatizing; and descriptions of possibilities, real alternatives to oppressive, inequitable, and unsustainable structures and processes.

Designed for use as a core text on all HBSE modules on BSW and MSW social work programs, it will also be of interest to novice social workers, social workers engaged in professional development, and allied human services professionals.

James Angelo Forte is a Professor at the School of Social Work, Salisbury University, a social worker, and a researcher/theorist with interests in critical symbolic interactionism, justice/injustice, vulnerable populations, and the legacy of Jane Addams.