Michael Lavalette - What is The Future of Social Work?: A Handbook for Positive Action

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

Policy Press 2019

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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978-1-4473-4081-2 hardback

978-1-4473-4082-9 paperback

987-1-4473-4083-6 ePub

978-1-4473-4097-3 ePDF

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Cover design by Andrew Corbett

Front cover image: Alamy

Contents

Peter Dowd

Michael Lavalette

Michael Lavalette

Brid Featherstone

Mark Lymbery

Iain Ferguson

Jan Walmsley

Peter Beresford

Gurnam Singh

John Harris

Chris Jones

Michael Lavalette

Figures

Tables

Peter Beresford OBE is Professor of Citizen Participation at the University of Essex and Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at Brunel University London. He is a long-term user/survivor of mental health services and co-chair of Shaping Our Lives, the independent UK disabled peoples and service users organisation (www.shapingourlives.org.uk/). He has a long-standing interest in issues of participation as researcher, writer, campaigner, educator and service user. He is author of A Straight-Talking Introduction to Being a Mental Health Service User (PCCS Books, 2010) and his latest book is Madness, Violence, and Power: A Critical Collection (University of Toronto Press, 2019, co-edited with Andrea Daley and Lucy Costa).

Brid Featherstone qualified as a social worker in the early 1980s and worked in the areas of juvenile justice and generic social work as a practitioner and manager. Since 1992 she has been involved in higher education as a lecturer and researcher. She has been involved in a number of international research projects on gender issues in child welfare and was a member of the team on the project Fathers Matter, a six-year research programme on fathers engagement with social work and social care services. With Kate Morris and Sue White she has written the influential and widely discussed book, Re-imagining Child Protection: Towards Humane Social Work with Families (Policy Press).

Iain Ferguson has worked in social work education from the early 1990s; before that he worked for many years as a community worker and social worker in a range of different settings in the west of Scotland. These included area teams, a lone parent groupwork project and a psychiatric hospital, where he qualified as a Mental Health Officer. He is a founder member of the Social Work Action Network and a founding editor of Critical and Radical Social Work: An International Journal. His most recent books are Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress (Bookmarks, 2017) and (with Michael Lavalette and Vasilios Ioakimidis) Global Social Work in Political Context (Policy Press, 2017). He retired from the University of the West of Scotland in 2014.

John Harris is Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick and works at Coventry University. Before becoming an academic, he worked for 15 years in local authority social work, where he was secretary of the shop stewards committee and, for the last five years, a district manager. One of his interests has been the changing nature of social work under neoliberalism, in the UK and elsewhere, an interest that has been pursued in publications such as The Social Work Business Routledge, 2003) and Modernising Social Work: Critical Considerations (Policy Press, 2009). He is the co-editor (with Vicky White) of the Oxford Dictionary of Social Work and Social Care (2nd edn, 2018).

Chris Jones was born in 1951 in England. He is very much a child of the British welfare state that was put into place between 1946 and 1950. One of the most tangible benefits was free education, which included his years in state schools and then into higher education. It also gave him a career in teaching and research, latterly as Professor of Social Work at Liverpool University, which he terminated in 2006 when he moved to Samos, a Greek island in the eastern Aegean close to the Turkish coast. On Samos, he continues to work with Tony Novak and a new collaborator, Sofiane Ait Chalalet. Together they work with refugees and write to share their experiences on their blog, Samos Chronicles.

Michael Lavalette is Professor in Social Work and Head of the School of Social Sciences at Liverpool Hope University. He was a founding member of the Social Work Action Network and is coeditor of Critical and Radical Social Work: An International Journal. He has written and edited a total of 17 books and numerous academic papers. His most recent books are (with Steve Cunningham) Schools Out! The Hidden History of School Student Strikes (Bookmarks, 2016) and (with Iain Ferguson and Vasilios Ioakimidis) Global Social Work in Political Context (Policy Press, 2017). He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical and Radical Social Work, published by Policy Press.

Mark Lymbery is an Honorary Associate Professor in Social Work at the University of Nottingham. He has published numerous books and articles that focus on the practice of social work, especially with older people and adults. Particularly pertinent in respect of this is a recent book (written with Karen Postle), The Social Work Role in Transforming Adult Social Care: Perpetuating a Distorted Vision? (Policy Press, 2015).

Gurnam Singh is currently Principal in Social Work at Coventry University and Visiting Professor of Social Work at the University of Chester. Prior to entering academia in 1993, he worked as a professional social worker and community activist. He completed his PhD from the University of Warwick in 2004 on anti-racist social work. Gurnam has developed an extensive academic profile over the past 25 years. He has presented over 100 papers at national and international conferences, many as an invited keynote speaker, and contributed as single or joint author to over 50 books, articles, research reports and blogs.

Jan Walmsley