Chris Horsell – författare

This book highlights the importance of employing imaginative sensibilities to thinking and action in social work and social policy practice. Exploring the question of how ideas about utopia and utopian method can be used in social work practice and policy practice to address social inequalities, it shows that central to this critique is the argument that contemporary social policy responses and subsequent social work interventions to a range of policy problems (e.g. homelessness, poverty, family violence) need to acknowledge the failure of dominant neoliberal discourses in addressing these issues. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and, in many ways, exacerbated existing inequalities, and the post-pandemic future provides opportunities to put utopian ideas into action. Showing how utopian thinking can challenge fundamental assumptions regarding welfare dependency and unitary identities in policy settings, this book will be of interest to all scholars, students and professionals working in social work and social policy.

This book highlights the importance of employing imaginative sensibilities to thinking and action in social work and social policy practice. Exploring the question of how ideas about utopia and utopian method can be used in social work practice and policy practice to address social inequalities, it shows that central to this critique is the argument that contemporary social policy responses and subsequent social work interventions to a range of policy problems (e.g. homelessness, poverty, family violence) need to acknowledge the failure of dominant neoliberal discourses in addressing these issues. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and, in many ways, exacerbated existing inequalities, and the post-pandemic future provides opportunities to put utopian ideas into action. Showing how utopian thinking can challenge fundamental assumptions regarding welfare dependency and unitary identities in policy settings, this book will be of interest to all scholars, students and professionals working in social work and social policy.

This book broadens the concept of hope used in social work research, education, policy and practice. Moving beyond individualist analyses of hope that construct social workers as givers and holders of hope, it draws on intersectionality to argue that individualist articulations of hope in social work need to be interrogated to make visible structural and social contexts that are often marked by intersecting social and systemic oppressions and inequalities.

Discussing multidisciplinary research and conceptualisations of hope as a multidimensional concept that includes both individual and radical structural and social change in social work, this book theorises the importance of engaging with critical, radical and utopian conceptualisations of hope across social work research and practice. It also highlights how radical notions of hope are envisioned in different activist campaigns and across diverse fields of social work practice, including in revolutionary, abolitionist and system reform campaigns associated with Indigenising social work, incarceration, child protection and advocating for a greener world.

By theorising hope as an integral component in critical and radical social work’s commitment to social justice, in the context of the hegemony of neoliberal thinking, this book will be of interest to all scholars, students and practitioners of the subject.