Using Social Research for Social Justice: An Introduction for Social Work and Human Services

This book will inspire the next generation of social work and human service practitioners to integrate research into their everyday social justice practice. Through highlighting the centrality of values to the task of research and the possibilities for enacting social justice through our research practice, it argues for respectful, meaningful, and just relationships with the people with whom we do research and build knowledge; acknowledges the ongoing impact of colonialism; respects diversity; and commits to working towards social change. With First Nations Worldviews – ways of knowing, ways of being, ways of doing – weaved throughout the text, this book seeks to both reclaim ancient knowledges and disrupt Western research traditions.

Divided into three sections, this book provides

• a strong rationale for the importance of research skills to social work and human service practice;
• a step-by-step guide on doing social research aimed at novice researchers;
• a series of examples of applied social justice projects

Bringing the authors’ passion for finding new ways of ‘doing’ research and contesting traditional research paradigms of objectivity and the scientific, it advocates for knowledge building that is participatory, emancipatory, and empowered.

It will be required reading for all social work and human service students at both the undergraduate and master's level as well as professionals looking to put research into practice.

Margot Rawsthorne has lectured in community development with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia, since 2005. Her research has focused on the experience of inequality, particularly shaped by gender, location, housing, and sexuality. Her research aims to create social change.

Emma Tseris is Lecturer in Social Work and Policy Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, where her research and teaching areas include critical mental health theory, mental health and gender inequality, and narrative research methodologies.

Amanda Howard teaches and researches in all things related to communities at the University of Sydney, Australia. That includes encouraging closer, fairer, and more inclusive connections, community planning for disasters, and mobilising community power. Her research is about getting unheard stories and voices on the policy and practice agenda.

Mareese Terare is a Bundjalung Goenpul Woman, Mother, Grandmother. She is currently employed as an academic in the Social Work Program at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her specialist areas of research and teaching consist of Aboriginal healing frameworks and ways, interpersonal trauma, counselling, social justice, children’s rights, and human rights.

Alankaar Sharma is a social work researcher and educator. He currently works as an academic at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His research and teaching are inspired by social justice, feminism, and critical social work. Confronting and ending oppression against marginalised people is at the heart of his social justice-oriented social work practice.