“Live Social Work”: How to Bring Life Back into Social Work

Abstract

In this article I discuss how professional social work can entail critical, reflexive work. This is accomplished by adapting the concept of “live sociology”. It is mainly an exploratory article, trying to raise suggestions that can be adopted and be further developed. I argue that people coming into contact with contemporary social work are sometimes reduced to being “dead” objects, as they are pinned down into static categories. The demand for developing evidence-based social work risks substantiating this tendency even further. In contrast, I claim that social work needs to move away from these kinds of explanations and instead turn towards developing “live social work”; that is to say, social work where everyday life, agency, and what people do in what context needs to be the focus, not what people are.

本文里讨论了专业社会工作如何才能具有批判性和反思性。 “活的社会学”的概念有助于它的实现。本文为探讨性研究，试图抛砖引玉。人们遭遇当代的社会工作，有时会被简化为一个“死”物，放进静止的类别。发展基于证据的社会工作，会进一步强化这种倾向。笔者认为社会工作需应脱离这类解释，转而去发展“活的社会工作”，即强调日常生活、机构以及人们干什么（而非是什么）、在哪儿干等等的社会工作。

Keywords:

• Gender
• Ethnicity
• Race
• Critical Social Work
• Evidence-based Practice

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Professor Back for not only inspiring me to write this article, but also for taking the time and providing me with his articles and book chapters on the issue. The author would further like to thank the reviewers providing very important suggestions on how to make my points even clearer.

Notes

1 Freely adapted and borrowed from Back (2012c).