ABSTRACT
There are major challenges facing developed countries in the future provision of support and care. Social work would seem to be well placed to offer constructive ways of thinking about these issues and contributing to positive ways ahead. Yet, social work’s own engagement with the concept and provision of care shows a conflicted history. The chapter reviews the features of a progressive concept of care, aligned with the premises of critical social work. It explains how a progressive concept of care affords a necessary counter-proposition for the practice of social work in contemporary organisational and policy contexts. The chapter then proceeds to discuss how a progressive concept of care can usefully be elucidated as an expansive one that crosses customary borders between professions, organisations, systems and discourses. In particular, the chapter shows how, by adopting a critical ethics of care and locating its practice within a multiplicity of complex environments, social work is challenged by the paradigm to adopt new forms of cross-disciplinary and collaborative practice. In latter sections of the chapter, observations are offered on how this progressive and expansive care paradigm is informing a specific initiative being undertaken within one metropolitan university in Australia, with the aim of building capacity for socially just systems of support and care into the future.
