Abstract
The 21st-century challenges to social justice, human rights, and citizenship posed by transnational capital, growing global inequality and social exclusion, and multiple forms of violence confront the limits of the social work imagination and call for creative and critical interventions that focus on social justice. In this article we contend that the dominant theoretical approaches to social work practice are inadequate, and we consider the possibilities and limitations of alternative approaches informed by critical social theory. We argue for the Just Practice Framework, a social justice-oriented approach to social work, as a corrective to current models.