- Title
- Social work in extremis: human rights, necropolitics, and post-human onto-ethics
- Creator
- Ottmann, Goetz; Brito, Iris
- Date
- 2022
- Type
- Text; Book chapter
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/199953
- Identifier
- vital:19286
- Identifier
-
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1015-9_27
- Identifier
- ISBN: 978-981-19-1015-9
- Abstract
- International social workers inserted into crises contexts in the global South need concepts and theories in order to make sense of local circumstances and conditions and to inform their practice. This chapter applies a critical posthumanist lens to such conflict situations. Post-humanism, as shall emerge, deconstructs the term ‘human’ and its associated socio-political significance viewing ‘human’ as a contested hierarchical category (Braidotti, 2013) at the core of a biopolitics involving “life itself” (Agamben, 1998). Employing a critical post-humanist lens could expose decisions such as ending the Western military intervention in Afghanistan as acts of necropolitics, Mbembe’s term denoting policies that decide over life and death (Mbembe, 2019). A post-humanist analysis could be used to highlight the fragility of supposedly inalienable human rights. The question raised in this chapter is whether this kind of deconstruction of humanist universals that brings to light ethno-centric arrogance as well as brutality and cruelty can assist social workers to make sense of the events unleashed by militants in Afghanistan or Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province and ultimately lead to better social work practice.
- Publisher
- Springer Nature Singapore
- Relation
- Social work theory and ethics : ideas in practice p. 479-497
- Rights
- All metadata describing materials held in, or linked to, the repository is freely available under a CC0 licence
- Rights
- Copyright @ Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd
- Subject
- Postcolonialism; Human rights; Posthumanism
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