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What is social policy?

This is an RSW experiment in providing resources for the educational commons that are freely available to all using creative commons licensing.

In this case we are releasing a podcast interview. Neil Ballantyne (Open Polytechnic of New Zealand) interviews Liz Beddoe (University of Auckland) about the social policy text she edited with Jane Maidment (Maidment & Beddoe, 2016). Neil asks Liz three questions:

  • What is social policy?
  • What is unique about social policy in Aotearoa?
  • Why do social work students need to study social policy?

Post a comment to let us know what you think and tell us if we should create more resources like this one.

This podcast is copyright RSW Collective and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to download it and embed it in your own teaching and learning resources, so long as you attribute it to “RSW Collective (2021, January) https://www.reimaginingsocialwork.nz/2021/01/what-is-social-policy/”

Reference

Maidment, J. & Beddoe, L. (Eds.) (2016). Social Policy for social work and human services in Aotearoa New Zealand: Diverse perspectives. University of Canterbury Press.

Photo by ConvertKit on Unsplash

Podcast music: cello pizz 01 by Morusque (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. 

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What is really going on here?

Ideas are never neutral. As Marx and Engels observed, those who define the dominant ideas control the world:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. (Marx & Engels, 1964)

The following is a brief historical exploration of how the seductive and insidious ideology of neoliberalism has come not only to dominate the social policy landscape in Aotearoa – New Zealand  but also to colonise our common sense and rob us of our political imaginations.