Introduction
Social work around the world is currently facing unprecedented challenges, with deepening ecological crises, mass-scale refugee and asylum seeker movements, rising right-wing populism, increasing social and political inequalities, economic austerity, intensified militarisation, the continuing effects of colonialism, and escalating gendered and racial violence. While there is a strong tradition of radical and critical social work responding to these issues (Baines, 2017; Ferguson & Woodward, 2009; Pease, Goldingay, Hosken & Nipperess, 2016), the argument of this book is that social work is constrained by dualistic frameworks that dichotomise the social and the natural.
Social work needs to challenge a series of dualisms – such as nature/culture, material/discursive, subject/object, human/animal, man/woman and North/South – that structure modern thinking. All such dualisms are hierarchical and legitimise all forms of oppression and human mastery of nature (Giraud & Grove, 2013; Plumwood, 1993). We must disrupt dualisms if we are to develop a new understanding of natureculture (Haraway, 2004, 2016).
Social work is at heart a liberal humanist project informed by a strong human rights framework. Responding to human rights critiques, this edited collection draws on literature on feminist new materialism, critical posthumanism and affect to critique the liberal framework as well as the moral superiority of humanism, which social work literature has largely tended to take for granted. Furthermore, the ‘human’ in human rights has too often been conflated with universalist and masculinist viewpoints and constrained by Western, legalistic frameworks (Braidotti, 2019a, 2019b; Ife & Tascon, 2016; Zembylas & Bozalek, 2014). Liberalism fosters ideals of autonomy, self-determination and individual responsibility. Humans are regarded as isolated, atomistic individuals and are not seen as connected to relationships with others and the natural world (Ife, 2016).
The ideal human in liberalism is represented as male, white, heterosexual, young and able-bodied, and is distinguished from other ‘lesser’ humans as well as from other animals and nature. Human rights have thus not been universally granted to all humans around the world. The limited framework which grants some humans more rights than others allows domination and oppression among humans and non-humans to flourish.
Critical theory, postcolonial theory and feminism have informed these critiques of humanism in social work. What is less acknowledged in social work, however, is how the dominant understanding of humanism is predicated on an individualist and western concept of ‘man’ and also disconnects humans from the natural environment. Humans are disembodied and seen as transcendent over the environment. Conventional social work paradigms, including radical and critical perspectives, have to date been unable to adequately theorise the entanglements between humans and nature (Bell, 2013).
Rosi Braidotti sees a convergence between posthumanism (critique of Man, especially European, white, heterosexual, Vitruvian, able-bodied Man as the universal standard by which all humans are judged) and post-anthropocentrism (critique of Anthropos, the centrality of the human or human exceptionalism) (Braidotti, 2019c). As Braidotti (2019c) notes, posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism are “equally powerful discourses” but come from different theoretical backgrounds and engender different political positions – the former from feminist, anti-racist and postcolonial discourses, the latter from climate change and the Anthropocene – as she says “we are in this position together but we are not one and the same – differences are embodied”. The challenges facing “us” require a paradigm shift away from anthropocentrism to a more ecocentric perspective, and one which decentres human exceptionalism. Fostering of human rights in ways that ignores co-imbrication of the human, non-human and more-than-human world perpetuates human privilege and human exceptionalism. We need to decentre the human in social work (Ife, 2016), from a relational ontological perspective. In other words, social work needs to be reconfigured bearing in mind the entanglement of nature/culture, material/discursive, subject/object, human/more-than-human.
In recent years, three overl...
