Embodiment: A Key to Social Workers’ Wellbeing and Attainment of Social Justice

Social work is not an easy occupation in which to participate—whether as a service user, practitioner, or service administrator. By its very nature, all actors are likely to experience uncomfortable physical sensations, difficult emotions, mental stresses, and moral challenges. While not a panacea to combat the impact of the complex issues experienced during a social work encounter, research has established that the body is not only necessary to navigate social difference and oppression, but also crucial to social workers’ wellbeing and the attainment of social justice (Cameron & McDermott, 2007; Johnson, 2015; Mensinga, 2017; Pyles, 2018). Embodiment is key to this process.

In our call inviting papers for this special issue, we broadly defined embodiment as “the ways in which biological, political, historical, economic, and social factors impact on, and become ‘embedded in’ individuals’ and society’s experience and identity”, and that these factors are “embodied by social workers in their everyday practice”. As a social work practitioner and academic, I (JM) am acutely aware of how easy it is to mouth the words “social justice” and “human rights” without actually knowing what these words feel like in my own body. I argue that without exploring embodiment and what it means for social workers at the micro, messo, and macro levels of practice, many of the hard-won legal and policy reforms achieved will continue to flounder. Offering opportunities to discuss embodiment in professional conversations and providing examples of how to engage with this wisdom to scaffold change underpins my hope for this special issue.

Having worked in social work practice settings and academic ones, I (LP) have come to realise the ways in which these contexts have perpetuated a kind of violence and marginalisation of my body, whether through sheer neglect, overriding my needs, or exhausting myself. Certainly, the research on compassion fatigue, burnout, and social worker wellbeing and resilience echoes my experience. But these terms fall short of capturing the moral, spiritual, emotional, and somatic injuries that disembodiment causes and fail to bring attention to the social structures, narratives, and practices that perpetuate a disembodied social work. For me, bringing attention to embodiment through this special issue is not only a kind of collective reckoning for the profession but also an act of personal healing.

From our perspective, a focus on embodiment draws attention to the important truths and many unstated stories contained in the body (Krieger, 2005), which have generally been ignored or suppressed in social work practice. Green (2021) in her exploration of the role of smell and odour in social work practice has argued that without relevant knowledge and an appreciation of their impact, social workers are at significant risk of unwittingly correlating smells with negative personality types and group characteristics, and of misinterpreting serious situations that can contribute to further injustices. Expanding on phenomenological research, van Rhyn et al. (2021) highlighted that empathy, core to social work practice, is not so much a process of emulating the emotional and mental states of the other, but rather one in which the body is used as a “powerful instrument” to physically feel, interpret, and express emotional and mental states. They concluded that “(f)uture conceptualisations of empathy used in social work theory, education, and practice would benefit from taking an embodied approach” (p. 146).

Important to social workers, a focus on embodiment confirms that people’s lived realities in their human bodies, particularly their somatic and felt experiences, are intricately connected to their social location, the larger political economy, and aspects of identity that are entangled with systems of structural oppression. Smoyer, Divita, and Perrault (2021) highlighted well the adverse relationship between structures of power and bodies in their research exploring masculine embodiment practices among sexual minorities in a women's prison. They argue that social workers should ask clients themselves to identify their gender, accept their description and ask questions about how it feels to exist within their body rather than rely on written intake forms or observable bodily practices. Furthermore, they argue that social workers need to “(p)rioritise correctional policies that promote the health and safety of incarcerated people and staff over policies that enforce social norms related to gender” (p. 172). Similarly, Wong and Vinsky (2021) argued that implicit bias in professional practice is not just in the brain, but is multifaceted and is impacted by the whole body and organisational and cultural contexts. They recommend that interventions to interrupt implicit bias and enhance antioppressive and critical social work practice include “(t)eaching body awareness combined with critical reflective practice” (p. 186).

Of course, embodiment is not new. Aristotle and Plato debated the role of the mind and body in ancient Greece and more recently feminists (e.g., Grosz, 1994) have argued the importance of gender to human experience. Moreover, many non-Euro-western cultures have long developed systems to understand and utilise embodied practices (e.g., walking, dance, drumming, Yoga, Tai Chi, and martial arts), but their contribution to social work practice has been little understood or worse still, resisted. Satour and Goldingay (2021) identified that while Aboriginal worldviews have always included the whole self, non-Aboriginal social workers and academics have difficulty in moving beyond a “helping” (p. 198) stance to experience this understanding in their professional practice. Similarly, Mensinga (2021) revealed that while Australian social workers identified personal and professional benefits from participating in yoga practices, they found it difficult or struggled to articulate how yoga can contribute and be included.

Nonetheless, through the work of van der Kolk (2014) and other trauma specialists (e.g., Ogden et al., 2006; Porges, 2011), there has been increased recognition that interventions that connect people to their bodies, such as dance, drama, yoga, and play, offer new opportunities for healing and provide a pathway for social workers to include them in professional practice. Spence (2021), when reflecting on her role as a yoga teacher at a large inpatient psychiatric hospital, identified that “small doses of breath and movement” (p. 235) offered social workers and their clients an opportunity to connect to themselves and their clients. In another example, Sirs and Meek (2021) used case examples to highlight how poi spinning can be used to facilitate self-regulation, expression, and body awareness in clients.

In conclusion, we argue that a focus on exploring embodiment is especially salient in this moment amid innumerable social injustices, climate crisis, and a global pandemic. In the context of digital global capitalism, many of us find ourselves spending too many of our waking hours sitting and clicking in front of screens, disconnecting us from the felt sense of ourselves including basic somatic cues such as thirst, muscular tension, and fatigue. For social workers facing mounting community needs, budget cuts, and high-pressure environments, we believe this issue is not only timely but long overdue.