Convenors
Claudia Mantovan, University of Padova
claudia.mantovan@unipd.it (corresponding scholar)
Omid Firouzi Tabar, University of Padova
omid.firouzitabar@unipd.it
This panel aims to open a critical and interdisciplinary discussion on the exercise of power in social work, a topic receiving growing attention (Webb 2019). Although social work literature often distinguishes between “support” and “care” interventions on the one hand, and those defined as “control” on the other, in reality the former also represent a form of social control (Cohen 1985): the point, therefore, is not whether social workers exercise power – this is well established – but how they exercise it: in a paternalistic and oppressive way, or in a transformative and anti-oppressive way (Scarscelli 2022). These power asymmetries and their ambivalent use concern not only professional social work, but also that carried out by volunteers and activists. Reflections on this topic developed starting from the late 1960s, with the birth of the Radical Social Work theoretical and practical strand in the UK (Bailey & Brake 1975), and with the subsequent development, a decade later, of the Critical Social Work approach (Fook 2003), which progressively integrated the Marxian approach of Radical Social Work with other theoretical contributions, including the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, feminism (Dominelli & McLeod 1989), critical race theory (Dominelli 1988), postmodern and poststructural approaches (Pease & Fook 1999, Healy 2000), and, more recently, postcolonial theories as well. In the Italian context, the debate on the topic of power in social work has only recently emerged and has also triggered the birth of a network of social workers and researchers who signed a “Manifesto del lavoro sociale anti-oppressivo” [“Manifesto of anti-oppressive social work”]. One of the topics of reflection within this network and within recent international literature in the field of Critical Social Work, which we would also like to discuss in this panel, concerns the conditions of possibility of a critical social work in the current era, in which mass incarceration processes and neoliberal restructuring, with the progressive entry of penal logics into social intervention, have made welfare increasingly residual, selective, reward-based, and disciplinary. These topics appear interesting and relevant both from an academic and a social/political point of view, and lend themselves to being investigated from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Qualitative and ethnographic methods, as well as autoethnographic ones (Adams et al. 2017), appear best suited to thoroughly investigate the complexity and contradictions that these topics present. This is possible especially because of the potential of such methodological tools to penetrate the cognitive and perceptual layers of the actors in the field and, in doing so, to adequately connect the sphere of subjective expression with structural variables.
Open questions
- What forms of power and social control are enacted in social work? What forms of resistance to that power emerge?
- What methodological tools and analytical categories are best suited to analyze the topic of power in social work?
- What are the potentialities of qualitative and ethnographic methods in investigating the topic of power in social work?
- How can researchers navigate the challenges of positionality in research on power dynamics in social work?
- What is the relationship between knowledge and power? More specifically, how do the epistemological approach and the knowledge paradigms adopted by workers, volunteers, or activists influence the ways in which they exercise their power over the recipients of their intervention?
- An anti-oppressive approach in social work implies a recognition that large-scale social processes, particularly those associated with class, race and gender, contribute fundamentally to the personal and social issues social workers encounter in their practice: how is it possible to reconcile everyday social work with the goal of acting on the social structures that generate inequality? Are the two in contradiction, or can they coexist?
- Is it possible to adopt an anti-oppressive approach in social work in the current era, marked by the convergence of ultra-liberal policies, a war regime, dynamics of criminalization and incarceration, and the erosion of social policies?
- What connection exists between social work and research? How can forms of anti-oppressive social work be linked to participatory and emancipatory research practices?
- How can the ways in which social workers, volunteers, and activists exercise power influence the processes of policy implementation, expanding or restricting the exercise of rights by recipients?
- How does the power relationship between worker and beneficiary change depending on the context (institutional social work, social work in cooperatives or associations, volunteering, activism) and the field of intervention?.
Keywords
social work; social control; power; anti-oppressive approach; neoliberalism; criminalization; positionality
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
critical social work; critical criminology; sociology of law and deviance; intersectionality; critical race theory; social policy studies; sociology of work and professions
References
Adams T.E., Ellis C. & Jones S.H. (2017). Autoethnography, in J. Matthes, C. S. Davis, & R. F. Potter (eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ.
Bailey R. & Brake M. (eds) (1975), Radical social work, Edward Arnold, London.
Cohen S. (1985), Visions of social control, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Dominelli L. (1988), Anti-Racist Social Work, Palgrave MacMillan, London.
Dominelli L. & McLeod E. (1989), Feminist Social Work, Palgrave MacMillan, London.
Fook J. (2003), Critical Social Work. The Current Issues, «Qualitative Social Work», 2 (2), pp. 123-130.
Healy K. (2000), Social Work Practices. Contemporary Perspectives on Change, Sage, London.
Pease B. & Fook J. (eds) (1999), Transforming Social Work Practice: Postmodern Critical Perspectives, Routledge, London.
Scarscelli D. (2022), Controllo e autodeterminazione nel lavoro sociale. Una prospettiva anti-oppressiva, Meltemi, Milano.
Webb S.A. (ed.) (2019), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Social Work, Routledge, London.
Convenors’ bio
Claudia Mantovan is a Tenure-track Researcher (Fixed-term Researcher Type B) in Sociology of Law, Deviance and Social Change at the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology (FISPPA) at the University of Padua. She is part of the research group SLAN.G – Slanting Gaze on Social Control, Labor, Racism and Migration (http://www.slang-unipd.it). Her research focuses on processes of criminalization and racialization targeting Roma and Sinti communities as well as migrants, both in urban and criminal justice contexts, their forms of agency and self-organization, and anti-oppressive approaches in social work and research.
Omid Firouzi Tabar holds a PhD in Sociology of Cultural Phenomena and Normative Processes. He is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Padua and programme coordinator of the Master’s in “Critical Criminology and Social Security” at the same university. His research focuses on new forms of border and migratory movement governance, with particular attention to differential inclusion, the role of law, and the multiple counter-conducts and forms of resistance enacted by migrants. Specifically, through ethnographic research, he is currently working on the evolution of asylum law and the organization of the reception system for refugees and asylum seekers.