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Repairing What’s Left in Social Work, or, When Knowledge No Longer Cuts

Oxford University Press

In this paper I take as my problematic the reproduction and renewal of justice cultures within social work after the fall of left progress narratives. My point of departure is the question of how our applied discipline might imagine and practice and teach justice when there are no guarantees that we are actually good people or that our justice work does not cause harm. Orienting to social work as a world-making project that exceeds us all, I weave scholarship from social work historians together with contemporary debates among the left to propose a form of reparative historical practice that might stimulate the justice imaginations of our field. Anchoring this discussion around the concepts of keywords, structures of feelings, and disciplinary desire, I theorize some of the ways in which the histories and justice imaginations of individuals and generations converge within our discipline. Emphasizing the relational nature of this proposed historical practice, I argue social work must make into an effective knowledge the fact that it is impossible to act in the world without ever causing harm. Allowing ourselves to be cut by this knowledge is necessary if we are to repair what is left in social work.

Text

2024-01-04

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87064

Tina E. Wilson, Repairing What’s Left in Social Work, or, When Knowledge No Longer Cuts, The British Journal of Social Work, Volume 47, Issue 5, July 2017, Pages 1310–1325

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/