ABSTRACT
This paper explores Iris Marion Young’s social connection model of responsibility for justice. Its purpose is to contribute to the development of an ethics of responsibility for social work and other caring professions. Our arguments are grounded in an auto-ethnographic study conducted in 2008 by one of the authors while practicing as a social worker with a South African refugee services provider. We ask: What did it mean for the care workers to respond justly to refugees in the light of the complex structural and other constraints that circumscribed their work? What constituted the relationship between individual and collective responsibility in this response? We propose that developing an ethics of responsibility requires us to pay attention to the intricate processes which translate structural injustices into social care settings, and to the dynamics which cause them to be either reproduced or resisted. Our explorations show how Young’s social connection model can make a valuable contribution to conceptualisations of what responsibility for justice means, and what actions this implies. We conclude that such an approach could be helpful whenever care workers seek to promote social justice in responses to the very structural injustices within which they are implicated.
