Janet L. Finn - Just Practice: A Social Justice Approach to Social Work

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Oxford University Press 2021, 2016

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Finn, Janet L., 1956 author.

Title: Just practice : a social justice approach to social work /

Janet L. Finn, University of Montana.

Description: Fourth edition. | New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020029506 (print) | LCCN 2020029507 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780197507520 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197507544 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Social service. | Social servicePhilosophy. | Social justice.

Classification: LCC HV40 .F53 2021 (print) | LCC HV40 (ebook) |

DDC 361.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029506

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029507

This book is dedicated to the University of Montana MSW
students who continue to teach me about the meaning
and power of social justice work.

The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.

Marian Wright Edelman (2001)

Welcome to the complex and dynamic terrain of social work. Some of you will be reading this book because you are planning to pursue a career in social work. Perhaps your image of the field is still fuzzy, waiting to be developed in the coming weeks and months. Others may encounter this book after years of experience in the social work profession. Perhaps your own life and work experiences, political commitments, or concerns about peoples everyday struggles for survival, rights, and dignity have brought you to these pages. You may have a clear image of social work practice in mind. Depending on your experience, you may wish to emulate this image or you may wish to change it.

We invite you to accompany us on this journey into social work and social justice. This is not a guided tour in which the reader is the passive recipient of the guides wisdom. Rather, this is a journey that we take togetherteaching, learning, and creating knowledge as we go. Just Practice is a different kind of book. It is not a collection of facts about the practice of social work. It does not offer cookbook solutions to various human problems. Just Practice poses more questions than it offers answers, and it encourages question posing as a key component of practice. It is a foundation and starting point for ongoing dialogue and critical inquiry, which, in turn, can serve as a base for your own critical and creative practice of social work.

Just Practice tells a story of both the complexities and possibilities of social work. It is in part a reclamation project, recovering the histories, stories, and sense of urgency and possibility that have sparked the imagination and fueled the commitment of those engaged in social-justiceoriented work over time. Just Practice tells a story of the meanings, contexts, histories, power, and possibilities of social work and its relationship to social justice. It offers insights grounded in peoples everyday practice of social work and everyday struggles for social justice. It provides a framework for diverse voices to be heard. It informs a new way of imagining and practicing what we call social justice work.

We invite you to be more than a reader of the text. We challenge you to be an active participant in crafting the possibilities for bridging social work and social justice. We challenge you to walk the talk of social justice in the daily practice of social work. We encourage teachers and students alike to take risks; to move from safe, familiar pedagogical spaces and practices; to challenge assumptions; to sit with ambiguity; and to embrace uncertainty. We hope you find the journey into social justice work both informing and inspiring.

Many textbooks have been written about the practice of social work. Why do we need another one? What does Just Practice offer that is different from books that have come before it? Just Practice puts social works expressed commitment to social justice at center stage. We offer a framework for thinking about and practicing social work that engages with the visions, hopes, and challenges of building and living in a just world. In brief, Just Practice offers a critical approach to social work wherein we continually question our certainties, reflect on our practice, and probe ways in which historical and contemporary forces of injustice produce pain and struggle in peoples everyday lives. The Just Practice framework provides a guide to critical social work that integrates politics, ethics, and rights; translates the concept of social justice into concrete practice; and responds to the complex terrain of twenty-first century social work.

Social work in the mid-twenty-first century faces profound challenges. While advances in information and communication technologies have shrunk distances of time and space, the expansion of the global market has contributed to a widening gap between rich and poor (Oxfam America, 2020). Alongside these globalizing trends we are bearing witness to a rise in nationalism and autocratic rule. Access to safe affordable housing, food, water, and health care has grown ever more precarious in the United States and abroad. The displacement and migration of human populations in response to war, economic dislocation, and environmental disasters pose challenges to states and nations and notions of social welfare (Abrahamian, 2020). Nearly seventy-five years have passed since the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, yet violations of those rights continue in the United States and worldwide.

As this book goes to press, the world is gripped by the profound human toll of the coronavirus epidemic. COVID-19 is described by some social commentators as an equal opportunity virus that does not discriminate regarding whom it attacks. However, those who already bear the burden of health disparities, who lack safe options for shelter, who do not have the privilege of social distancing, and who have been systematically marginalized by unjust social and economic policies are all the more vulnerable in this face of this insidious enemy. As the disproportionate death toll for African Americans and other communities of color rises in the United States, the deeply embedded structures of racism are made ever more visible.