Preface

Summary

Social work's history is one of tension, change and re-configuration over time and place. The global definition of social work (International Federation of Social Workers, 2014) articulates a profession committed to the promotion of ‘social change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people’, and rooted in principles of ‘social justice, human rights, [and] collective responsibility’. As editors, we share this emancipatory and liberatory vision for social work, and this book is motivated, in large part, towards highlighting the need for the continued prioritisation and defence of these foundations in response to current and future crises of occupational identity. For, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, hesitation or timidity about this vision when faced with the pressures of state coercion and control has too often led to the co-option of social work's identity, and its complicity with unjust and oppressive practices responsible for significant and ongoing harm and despair.

This book documents and attempts to make sense of the economic and sociopolitical context of these histories as a means both of recognising their continued legacy in many fields of contemporary practice and, more critically, for moving towards a meaningful path of healing and reconciliation for those communities affected. While this volume explores many troubling accounts of social work's history around the world, it also details hopeful moments in which social workers have, in solidarity with activists and others, courageously resisted and challenged oppressive systems and structures. As we argue, it is only from an honest and transparent accounting of, and recompense for, social work's contested history that a more hopeful and liberatory vision for its future can be imagined.

Part I provides a framework for approaching this ambitious task by offering a typology for making sense of both the nature and scope of social work's contested histories globally, and of efforts by national social work associations to respond to or acknowledge these histories. While recognising the efforts made by several professional associations, this opening section also presents our central thesis, that there is a need for a more nuanced approach to making amends for social work's past. Such an approach, we argue, must confront the structural and political conditions shaping social work's contested history, its disputed present and its uncertain future.