ABSTRACT

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Social Work brings together the world’s leading scholars in the field to provide a cutting-edge overview of classic and current research and future trends in the subject.

Comprised of 48 chapters divided into six parts:

  • Historical, social, and political influences
  • Mapping the theoretical and conceptual terrain
  • Methods of engagement and modes of analysis
  • Critical contexts for practice and policy
  • Professional education and socialisation
  • Future challenges, directions, and transformations

it provides an authoritative guide to theory and method, and the primary debates of today in social work from a critical perspective.

This handbook is a major reference work and the first book to comprehensively map the wide-ranging territory of critical social work. It does so by addressing its conceptual developments, its methodological advances, its value-based front-line practice and as an influence on the policy field. By offering a definitive survey of current academic knowledge as it relates to professional practice, it provides the first comprehensive, up-to-date, definitive work of reference while at the same time identifying emerging, innovative and cutting-edge areas.

part I|58 pages

Historical, social and political influences

chapter 3|11 pages

Marxist social work

An international and historical perspective

chapter 4|11 pages

Critical social work in the U.S.

Challenges and conflicts

chapter 5|13 pages

The rise of the global state paradigm

Implications for social work

part II|101 pages

Mapping the theoretical and conceptual terrain

part III|69 pages

Methods of engagement and modes of analysis

chapter 16|11 pages

Indigenous peoples and communities

A critical theory perspective

chapter 17|12 pages

Postcolonial feminist social work

chapter 19|12 pages

Controversy analysis

Contributions to the radical agenda

part IV|93 pages

Critical contexts for practice and policy

chapter 22|12 pages

Securitising social work

Counter terrorism, extremism, and radicalisation

chapter 28|12 pages

Performativity and sociomaterial becoming

What technologies do

part IV|110 pages

Critical contexts for practice and policy

chapter 29|12 pages

Challenging scapegoating mechanisms

Mimetic desire and self-directed groupwork

chapter 32|11 pages

Ageing, veterans and offending

Challenges for critical social work

chapter 33|18 pages

“Do you really want this in front of a judge?”

Age assessment with unaccompanied refugee children

chapter 34|11 pages

Toward a multispecies home

Bedbugs and the politics of non-human relations

chapter 36|12 pages

Critical debates in child protection

The production of risk in changing times

part V|73 pages

Professional education and socialisation

chapter 42|12 pages

Insinuating

Understanding approaches to critical practice

chapter 43|12 pages

Responding to neoliberalism in social work education

A neo-Gramscian approach

part VI|63 pages

Future challenges, directions and transformations

chapter 44|12 pages

Reprioritising social work practice

Towards a critical reconnection of the personal and the social

chapter 45|13 pages

Responding to political polarization

The new social work radicalism

chapter 46|13 pages

Popular social work