ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the evolution of critical social work in the US, contemporary challenges it faces, and potential responses to these challenges. By obscuring its critical history, social work’s “master narrative” reinforces its accommodation to dominant cultural institutions and values. Critical social workers based their conceptual frameworks on a range of secular and religious perspectives, but the influence of socialism is somewhat ambiguous. The re-emergence of critical social work in the 1930s coincided with the rise of the Rank and File Movement and the participation of social workers in left-wing unions and the Socialist and Communist parties. In the 1970s, social work scholars made initial attempts to define critical social work often using the ideas of international colleagues. The ideologies of these critical social workers vary depending on their background, the influence of certain authors or social movements, and the period when they reached maturity.
