Reimagining Social Work in AotearoaA guest post from Dr David Kenkel
A dictionary definition describes nostalgia as “A wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to, or of, some past period or irrecoverable condition” (Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, 2024). Nostalgia can be vicious; it is often a great deal more than the wistful yearnings for earlier remembered paradises.
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As a Collective we have developed a practice of reflection on the year past and the challenges ahead. The following are individual messages, yet they coalesce as an affirmation of unity and resolve. Times like these, locally and globally, can induce a logic of despair and defeatism, but such regressive political times can also engender a stubborn, stoic project of informed resistance. Don’t let anyone tell you that a more inclusive and socially just world is impossible. It is better by far, in whatever ways are open to you, to be a small part of making it so.
The time for solidarity with the beseiged and brutalised inhabitants of Gaza, the wider Palestinian people and their collective human right for an independent state, is now! It is time for the people of the Western world to summon the political will to demand a free Palestine. Che Guevara is credited with the following appeal for a revolutionary moral consciousness that is both personal and universal: “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world”. And, the Palestinian tragedy is not just another unfairness in an unfair world: it is perhaps the defining injustice of the post-war world order. It is a wound that has festered since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Change is needed in child welfare and in social work more broadly if we are to begin to realise a social justice mandate. It has become blindingly obvious that there are fundamental disjunctions between the way that the profession of social work likes to see itself and the reality of policy and practice. In this post I want to examine some key narrative threads and pose some questions.
We live in critical times. The unequal distribution of wealth and privilege (and the resulting unequal distribution of social suffering) continues to impact upon the stability of the world order. Arguably there is, at least, an increasing awareness of the social, economic, and environmental challenges which we are faced with collectively: as a planetary species. However, understandings of causes and solutions are, as always, contested. It is useful, I think, to attempt to unpack some of this complexity. Bear with me – I will return to what this unpacking may mean for progressive social work.