The unimaginable decade

RSW 2015-2025

Imagination is a promising concept – it suggests the infinite, an absence of boundaries, something new. A future we haven’t yet experienced, or a newly imagined past. To reimagine acknowledges the need for growth in our imagination, for change. Judith Butler (amongst others) talks about counter-imagining – the act of opposing the harmful and misinformed imaginations of others (Who’s Afraid of Gender?, 2024). 

The RSW collective blog began 10 years ago with this intent – to oppose a poorly imagined, uninformed government restructure of Oranga Tamariki (then Child Youth and Family). The blog offered a platform for resistance and dissent; a space to reimagine the future of contemporary social work in Aotearoa and to offer radical and critical analysis during times of increasingly conservative political narratives. 

The name and spirit of the collective was inspired by three social workers in the UK who wrote the book Reimagining Child Protection (Featherstone, White, & Morris, 2014). The authors interrogate the place of social justice within social work practice which they describe as “muscular authoritarianism towards multiply deprived families” (p 2). They grapple with all the tensions: care and control, key relationships between children, families and the state; the notion of risk; the systemic failure of child protection systems; the role of social work in neoliberal regimes. 

This work aligned with like-thinking social workers and allies in Aotearoa some of whom have used this blog over the years to question the project of social work in this country – to extend our “imaginings” of what it can be, or shouldn’t be and respond to issues and events in ways that that reflect these ideas. This post offers reflections from a few of us who have contributed to this space over the years. We continue to invite you to join us.

Rethink, reimagine, re-enact

Ian Hyslop

As a contributor, the RSW blog has helped to keep me sane over the last ten years. It is time to begin to rethink / reimagine where this collective effort is going and how to develop our social justice-driven intent into the future. More on this in later posts, but for now, in a time of professional and personal change, a moment of reflection.

I have long lost count of the blog posts I have banged up on this site. I am very grateful for a platform to share my passing thoughts on social work and the political context that it is inevitably bound up with. I have reflected on my own positionality, shared poems (when they erratically arrive), tried to capture some pivotal times in organisational policy and politics, and explored some of the contradictions and illusions of the liberal capitalist world.

And, of course, so much of this is coming to a head in these globally challenging times. Fascism is a real threat. The destruction of Gaza is a crime against humanity. Trump is like Rob Muldoon on crack cocaine.

I think that Liberal western states are fundamentally mired in unjust social relations because of the way that they are entangled with capitalism and coloniality. Some form of revolutionary shift and / or change from below is required but I don’t see the dictatorship of the working class emerging any time soon. And social work – despite the radical agenda of some and the endless message carrying of those of us positioned between the state and the marginalised – has too often taken a punitive and / or controlling role in the discipline of the para-proletariat (the persistent spectre of a threatening underclass).

We are riven with contradictions. Simple withdrawal of the state will only lead to accelerated corporate exploitation – this is written in letters 1,000 foot high in the machinations of the Trump regime. The established western centre-left is equally misaligned with the interests of those who social workers serve. In various ways this is what this blog platform has wrestled with over the last decade. 

This leaves us with the need to collectively rethink, reimagine and build another world – AND to rethink, reimagine and re-enact the role of social justice workers in this process: Nā tō raurau, nā taku rourou ka ora ai te iwi.

Betwixt and Between

Emily Keddell

This blog started ten years ago, prompted by the announcement of a set of child protection reforms lead by the same person who ‘reformed’ the benefit system just a couple of years earlier, in line with the small state/less expense/fend for themselves ideology. The sense of a rapidly evolving shift towards punitive and individualistic responses to families struggling in the grim vortex of poverty and discrimination lent a sense of urgency to our response. Nevertheless those reforms now seem like a skip through the roses compared to what faces us now. The recent report by Shamubeel Eaqub and Rosie Collins surfaces the deep social fracturing we are seeing as a result of ultra-right reforms in combination with political polarisation. These came hard on the heels of the earthquake that was covid, which split open, and reformulated, existing fault lines across our social landscape. The report notes how a deeply unequal society, combined with political polarisation is damaging our social cohesion. 

Also galling is our deeply unfavourable results compared to Australia. Here, only 32% of respondents to the survey said they were satisfied with their financial position, compared to 60% in Australia, while 25% miss meals due to financial hardship, twice the rate of Australians. Fewer than half of respondents said the government could be mostly or always trusted to do the right thing for the people of NZ, and this was even lower for Māori, Pacific and low income communities. Worryingly, 32% were open to “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with Parliament and elections”, rising to 47% of men in the under 30 age group.

An inability to know and understand one another, leads to damage to social cohesion, a precursor to strong man governments everywhere. Our social fabric is not just a little frayed, but has been thrown into a bucket of acid and left to disintegrate. Social workers bear witness to this disintegration, we see the results in our everyday lives and work to reduce its impact. We surf along on the liminal waves between those we work with and the wider norms, discourses and perspectives promulgated by politicians, policy and our peers. As the divide increases, social workers’ work of translation, of bridging, of explaining one to the other, becomes more and more difficult. It can be a lonely place, torn between the realities of our clients and the public/personal worlds we inhabit at other times. Articulating this betwixt and between position, and surfacing its possibilities, contradictions and challenges, as well as how to survive and mobilise despite it, has always been part of this blog and its intent. We hope to continue to do so. 

Imagining other worlds: utopia and hope

Neil Ballantyne

For the last ten years, imagining alternatives and the mantra that “other worlds are possible” has always been part of the beating heart of our blogging collective. As social work academics and social activists we have blogged on issues ranging from the use of artificial intelligence in child protection to the return of rangatahi boot camps. We have highlighted incipient threats to reproductive justice, raged against the genocidal Israeli war machine, and insisted on tino rangatiratanga for Māori. We have welcomed others to our platform and amplified the voices of practitioners and researchers from Aotearoa, Australia and Canada.

But imagining alternatives has always been part of our narrative, made explicit with posts on ideas for a feminist life, imagining real utopias and on radical hope. Our work resonates strongly with Ruha Benjamin’s recent text where she writes, citing Angela Davis:

We need to give the voice of the cynical, sceptical grouch that patrols the borders of our imagination a rest. After all, “Dangerous limits have been placed on the very possibility of imagining alternatives,” insists scholar and activist Angela Y. Davis. “These ideological limits have to be contested. We have to begin to think in different ways. Our future is at stake.” Imagination is a field of struggle, not an ephemeral afterthought that we have the luxury to dismiss or romanticize (Benjamin, 2024, p.8).

The task of imagination is a “field of struggle,” and the need for our engagement has never been more urgent. Our opponents – the political elite and their corporate master class – are currently conjuring a world into existence where rights achieved by years of collective struggle are rapidly dismantled and discredited, washed away like a coastline confronting climate change. We can feel the visceral impact of these forces not only as social workers but as trade unionists, parents, grandparents, users of public services, and citizens of our shared communities. 

Now is the time to do the work of resistance and reimagination. Arundhati Roy (cited by Benjamin, 2024) writes that “another world is not only possible, she is on her way . . . . On a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”

Benjamin, R. (2024). Imagination: A manifesto. W. W. Norton & Company

A record of social work dissent

Liz Beddoe

The Reimagining Social Work blog was born on 5 April 2015 as a couple of colleagues shared their fury at the announcement by then Minister of Social Development Anne Tolley announced the formation of an ‘independent expert panel’ to lead a ‘complete overhaul’ of Child, Youth and Family. What followed is history as many more ministers played the shifting the deckchairs game that is western child protection policy. If nothing else, it provides a record of social work dissent. The blog was intended to provide a platform for independent comment and discussion for social workers, at a time when there was much muzzling of critical opinion by informed professionals.  Centre right governments (despite their “free speech” pronouncements) love muzzling experts, especially when the evidence doesn’t suit their agenda. So, at the time of writing, we have seen a senior member of government refer to public health experts (highly regarded across the world) as muppets who should stay in their lane. 

While we imagined the blog would be a short-lived platform back in 2015, focused on child protections reforms, it has survived and over the ten years has focused on many issues- te Tiriti o Waitangi issues, mental health, unions, social work and technology, abuse in state care, the Israeli genocide in Palestine, and my own particular focus on reproductive rights. Starting in 2018 I raised the flag for reproductive rights as a social work issue. 

Over 2018 – 2019 as the campaign for law reform in Aotearoa gathered momentum there were a number of posts and podcasts to encourage the profession to take a strong stand for reproductive rights and abortion law reform and to instil human rights and values of autonomy and empathy. 

Later after the long-signalled fall of Roe v Wade in the United States a podcast about why we should care and what we should do explored the impact of the devastating decision which has led to severe illness and deaths of so many women already. 

Ramifications from the decision continue to develop as many states have implemented draconian bans, hampering health professionals and persecuting patients.  The state of Texas banned abortion, and a story this week reports on the arrests of healthcare workers for providing normal health care to a woman with a non-viable pregnancy. The state of Texas banned abortion and a recent report on ProPublica notes the rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester.  ProPublica found that after the state banned abortion, dozens more pregnant and postpartum women died in Texas hospitals than had in pre-pandemic years, as the maternal mortality rate dropped nationally, it rose substantially in Texas. These are the real consequences of so-called ‘pro-life’ policies. 

Even after the decriminalising of abortion in Aotearoa the fight for reproductive rights is not ensured. Eileen Joy and I wrote about the many ways legal abortion services can be undermined, and we currently have a Minister of Health who is anti-abortion. We also recorded a podcast that called for an end to harassment of people outside abortion clinics and the implementation of the safe areas provisions in the new legislation. 

I’ve been fortunate to be part of RSW and look forward to continuing to support a platform for critical advocacy on issues of concern for social work. As right-wing populism with its slavish bowing down to misguided fundamentalist Christianity continues to influence discourse about reproductive rights and impose long discredited prejudices about diverse sexualities and genders, we need this platform. 

Kia kaha comrades, long live the struggle for peace and justice. 

Hope and sleep

Deb Stanfield

Activist Rebecca Solnit talks about countering harmful imaginations with critical analysis, and describes this as the fundamental role of an academic, a researcher and commentator, an activist – a social worker. She also talks about countering despair with hope, and embracing darkness. Darkness suggests uncertainty, the unknown, obscurity, the unseeable. In exploring the darkness, says Solnit, we also find hope (Hope in the Dark, 2004).

Another activist, Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals,1972) talks about hope using the word optimism and the hope this brings. “….a future with a purpose, and therefore a will to fight for a better world. Without this optimism there is no reason to carry on” (p 21). Alinsky says any organiser for change in a free society is constantly querying, is compulsively curious about what is going on, knowing that it continually changes. What doesn’t change is the bedrock of democracy: social justice, equality, human rights – the greater the distance between these values and the reality of living in this world, the more “radical” becomes the response.  

Kaiwhakahaere Justin Tipa Hui Whakaū in his Te Tiriti ki Ōnuku 2025 commemoration speech on Waitangi Day queries the meaning of the radical in the context of change. In this same way, social workers are not all inherently radical, or revolutionary (or naïve), we simply respond to the increasingly extreme nature of contemporary social situations and ideologies. 

Contemporary composer Max Richter describes creativity as activism. His compositions are inspired for example, after attending an anti-war March in London, or in response to the refugee crisis. He also creates a whole eight hour album to sleep by, and I draw my own conclusions here. Our world is hard to live in, we need to react to what’s wrong. But we also need to sleep. Rebecca Solnit (again) in her various treatises on the notion of hope: “People too often thing hope is smiles and sunshine when it is fury in the face of danger and oppression and pressing on in the storm.” She also talks about taking a break, being silent, as like when sleeping, we need time to rest and regenerate. 

Just little gatherings of people with hope, a belief that things can be different, and an ability to find peace – they’re everywhere if you look in the right places.