Contemporary social work journal4/1/2023 I refer here to the challenges arising from practice, concerns about the capacity of critical social workers to respond to changing public administration contexts and postmodern analyses. However, less attention has been paid to the challenges from within the canon. Critical practice theorists are adept at responding to challenges from outside their tradition from the proponents of conservatism, economic rationalism and, more recently managerialism (see Dominelli, 1997 Ife, 1997 Rees, 1997). To this end, critical social workers have pursued practice theories that prioritise social structural analyses and promote collaborative approaches to action. The core mission of critical social work is to promote social justice through social work practice and policy making. By recognising the challenges from within, critical social workers can strengthen and diversify their capacity to forge critical approaches relevant to social work in the 21st century. It is argued that these contests provide sites for the reinvention of critical practice theory towards more collaborative and open ended approaches to activism in social work. These challenges arise from practice, from critical analyses of the changing environment of public administration and from postmodern analyses. The paper reviews contemporary contests from within the critical tradition to the core assumptions of critical practice theory. Indeed, some critical social workers have declared the halcyon days of activist practice have now passed. Substantial structural changes over the past four decades, including the rise of globalisation and market driven approaches to the management of human services, already threaten the continuation of critical practice traditions in social work. Reinventing Critical Social Work : Challenges from Practice, Context and Postmodernism Reinventing Critical Social Work: Challenges from Practice, Context and Postmodernism By Karen Healy, Department of Social Work, Social Policy and Sociology, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Abstract Although a critical tradition has existed in the social work profession since its inception more than a century ago, a distinct and internally diverse critical social work canon emerged only in the 1960s and 1970s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |