The advance of the COVID-19 pandemic is surely taking us into unchartered territories. What we are encountering is not a disaster or catastrophe of a kind with which we have some familiarity—bushfires, floods, wars, mass-migrations: it is something else on a scale simultaneously global and local for which few were adequately prepared and from which even fewer were protected. Its implications and the magnitude of its impact are only just beginning to be realised.
COVID-19 is a virus from which none of us is immune. We are certainly not immune from the devastating illness and mounting death toll caused by this insidious disease and its horrible consequences. Like it or not, we are active participants in an experience that is radically overturning any previous complacency and taken-for-grantedness of (what used to be) everyday life. The easy flow of global supply chains and movement of peoples across borders is, for now, ruptured. Unexpectedly, we see the tentative coming together—certainly in Australia—of once polarised political parties focused on shared perspectives to protect health and ensure financial safety nets for those ever-increasing newly unemployed. We witness an extraordinary demonstration of what can be achieved in liberal democracies with the exercise of political will for the common good, sometimes so lacking in prepandemic times, but bringing with it anxieties about the checks and balances needed for its exercise.
But of greater significance is how this pandemic has stripped away the social carapace to reveal extremely starkly, the morphology of our societies. With painful clarity we observe how those who are not equal are revealed as critically at risk and vulnerable, bearing the brunt of the pandemic’s impact: those who are poor, homeless, living with disabilities, refugees, asylum seekers, victims of domestic and family violence, Indigenous people, people who are incarcerated, those on the margins.
As the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) President Christine Craik has noted (AASW Social Work Australia podcast April 2020), social work stands at the frontline of these consequences, our person-in-context perspective well-honed and fit-for-purpose in addressing and responding to these challenges. Despite our readiness there remain enormous uncertainties about what to do, how to do it, what initiatives and novel responses in terms of theorisation, policy, and practice we can craft and deliver effectively. These concerns occupy a central place in our minds whether as scholars, academics, or practitioners, and as citizens.
This pandemic is only just beginning. Even as the curve may be flattened, infection rates reduced, perhaps a vaccine developed, the time frame is likely to be long. With this ongoing major disruption unfolding there are so many questions to raise, some yet to be formulated, about how to support those afflicted, how to mourn our dead, how to protect ourselves and our communities; how to emerge from social and physical distancing, how to respond with meaningful policies, and effective social and intervention programs, how to recover the economy, how to recover emotional wellbeing, in short, how to go on. When the end comes into view, do we revert to how we were? Do we collectively engineer a re-set of the local and the global?
In recognition of these generation-defining challenges that are confronting us, we have decided that Australian Social Work, published quarterly, will include a special section in each issue devoted to articles, papers, letters to the editor, commentaries and book reviews, analysing and informing the profession about the impact of and responses to COVID-19. We believe that there is great value in creating an ongoing conversation through the journal about the challenges, discoveries, successes, and failures that social workers identify, explore, and analyse during the course of the pandemic and in its aftermath. We are therefore announcing a Call for Papers for publication in a special section in each forthcoming issue. Each paper will be peer reviewed.
We look forward to your contributions. There is so much to be learned about the impact of COVID-19 on social workers, service users, service providers, policy makers and social work educators. Australian Social Work can, through this recurring special section in each issue, provide an invaluable resource and repository for knowledge generated by those at the frontline during and beyond this unique and exceptional time.
Call for Papers
Each submission must take as its central focus the COVID-19 Pandemic. Submissions might address one or more of the areas noted below:
Theoretical and conceptual issues (e.g., the structural nature of inequalities and impacts; interdependencies of health and public health responses; human rights issues; social work roles and activism; conceptual perspectives on COVID-19; complexity and other explanatory theory)
Policy issues and responses (e.g., health insurance; social welfare reform; public health; regional and urban impacts; immigration; education)
Research findings related to COVID-19 (e.g., evaluations of new programs; analysis of impact of social distancing on vulnerable groups; outcomes of innovative education strategies; training and working with volunteers; data mining and analysis of service users’ needs; analysis of changes in social workers’ roles during COVID-19; analysis of social work management strategies for staff WFH).
To be accepted for review, all papers should follow the Information for Authors and the procedures regarding manuscript preparation and submission to be found at: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=rasw20
For further information or queries, please email me at: [email protected]