Radical Challenges for Social Work Education

This book is full of ideas about how social work education can confront the individualising and often blaming form of social work that neoliberalism ushered in four decades ago. Radical social work is an approach to social work that has, at its heart, the departure from solely behavioural, moral or psychological understanding of service users’ problems. Social work had originally been concerned with the moral character of people in trouble (usually poor people), making a clear division between those who were ‘deserving’ of help and those who were ‘undeserving’. The rise of science and the ‘psy’ disciplines then led to psychological explanations for the difficulties people found themselves in.

Both explanations for social problems – moral and psychological – with their narrow focus on the individual have been enjoying a renaissance in recent times with the neoliberal self-sufficiency narrative (moral) and the more recent focus on trauma (psychological). Radical social work challenges those explanations, concerned as it is with the circumstances a person might find themselves in – poverty, poor housing, poor education, high crime rates, and lack of opportunities of all kinds. This book is a step towards resurrecting radical social work principles, and it urges us to think about how social work education can be reshaped to that end.

Radical Challenges for Social Work Education is a significant new contribution to social work practice and theory, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Politics, Education, Social Work, Sociology, Public Policy, Development Studies, Anthropology, and Human Geography.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Social Work Education.

Jane Fenton is Reader in Social Work at the University of Dundee, UK. She practised as a criminal justice social worker in Scotland for approximately 11 years before moving to the university in 2006. Her research and scholarship interests are in the newer generations of social work students; the effects of neoliberalism generationally and on practice; free expression and debate in the social work classroom; radical social work; and promoting attention to poverty and inequality by reclaiming liberal values for social work education. She has authored numerous journal articles, chapters, and two books: Values in Social Work and Social Work for Lazy Radicals.