Reimagining Social Work in AotearoaA guest post by Luis Arevalo
In 2018 Steve Bannon, who was once Trump’s chief strategist, described the act of overwhelming the opposition political party, the media, and society in general with copious amounts of information and noise as ‘Flooding the Zone’. The simple act of overwhelming the online and print media sectors with an enormous amount of ‘stuff’ has left society so inundated that they have given up trying to digest and understand what is going on.
On this ANZAC Day we remember the fallen in all wars and affirm our commitment to peace, justice and a future without war.
We recognise the fallen in the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars and the resistance of Māori to colonisation and seizure of land. In particular, we recognise the foundational non-violent resistance of Taranaki whānau at Parihaka. A form of resistance that later influenced both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
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 Israeli state has broken the hard-won ceasefire on Gaza and recommenced its campaign of bombing the Palestinian population of the overcrowded Strip. Israel’s refusal to move to phase two of the January ceasefire agreement has been followed by a fresh and devastating campaign of airstrikes. Already over 400 souls have been added to the death toll of over 48,000 (primarily women and children) since the start of the war.
While politicians, pundits, and the media tell stories about politics, economics, and society as if they were distinct spheres of influence, the working people of Aotearoa are acutely aware they are not.