ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes ‘popular’ to mean engaged with the popular movements for justice, the movements of which are sometimes referred to as the ‘popular classes’. The reality is that social work is a contested profession. There are competing philosophies of practice and engagement within social work that, in turn, reflect different orientations onto the social world. The purpose of re-discovering and establishing the range and extent of ‘popular social work’ projects is to emphasise several things. First, that social work has always been, and remains, a deeply contested project: there is no single entity ‘social work’. Second, social work is enriched by engaging with new, innovative and ‘popular’ forms of work that originate outside of the profession’s self-imposed boundaries. On the horizontal plain is ‘official social work’. On the left is a pathologising, controlling social work, on the right ‘radical social work’, with the majority of social workers floating between the two poles.
