Social work in extremis: human rights, necropolitics, and post-human onto-ethics
- Authors: Ottmann, Goetz , Brito, Iris
- Date: 2022
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Social work theory and ethics : ideas in practice p. 479-497
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- Description: 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.
Giorgio Agamben : sovereign power, bio-politics and the totalitarian tendencies within societies
- Authors: Ottmann, Goetz , Brito, Iris
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The Routledge Handbook of Critical Pedagogies for Social Work p. 223-232
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- Description: This chapter focuses on Giorgio Agamben’s work on power, sovereignty, bare life, and bio-politics. Agamben argues that the state of exception (where the state no longer orders forms of life, creating a kind of no-man’s-land where rules are made by those in charge) is the original political relation that continues to define the workings of the modern state. An example of this state of exception is the concentration camp, a place where human beings whose political rights are for some reason forfeited (e.g. ethnic or religious minorities, refugees, militant Islamists) are being stored and often destroyed. The structure of the camp, Agamben states, exists and endures in many other forms. He urges us that ‘it is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognise in all its metamorphoses’. How Agamben’s work is relevant to social work and how his analysis is valuable in critical social work education and practice is explored in this chapter. © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Christine Morley, Phillip Ablett, Carolyn Noble, and Stephen Cowden.
Refractory interventions : the incubation of Rival epistemologies in the margins of Brazilian social work
- Authors: Brito, Iris , Ottmann, Goetz
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Disrupting Whiteness in Social Work p. 139-155
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- Description: In Epistemologies of the South, Boaventura Sousa Santos argues that the most important struggle of our time is the struggle against ‘epistemicide’ and to break free from the epistemological poverty resulting from the dominance of neoliberal ideology that has become the hallmark of the early 21st century. In this chapter, we are arguing that social imaginaries are shaped and reshaped in the margins of the direct sphere of influence of the state, giving rise to ground-breaking experiments that can challenge the epistemological closure that often takes place within institutional spaces. Drawing on three Brazilian case studies, we illustrate the following: how Indigenous people appropriate a segment of the tourist industry commodifying a part of their culture in order to translate the economic capital derived from it into new Indigenous cultural capital to be used in a larger struggle against colonisation how Afro-Brazilian activists built community organisations in order to generate a pathway for disenfranchised Black Brazilians into higher education and how a Black Brazilian pastor managed to survive in a staunchly conservative and often racist Pentecostal church to ensure access to quality education and welfare for slum dwellers. In this chapter, we argue that this informal activist social work is central to the struggle for social alternatives and for social justice. This chapter focuses on some examples of how social work practice is being re-defined from the margins of the profession. The case studies exemplify how community initiatives are often decolonising key aspects of Brazilian society by approaching social issues from a grassroots perspective. The chapter provides inspiring and rich examples of localised action which reposition and reinvigorate epistemologies of the ‘south’, illustrating the liberating potential sourced in the margins. It presents a brief summary of emergent epistemological alternatives in everyday life in the southern Bahia, a state in the northeast of Brazil. Brazilian social work emerged during the first decades of the 20th century at the interstice of two powers that sought to extend their sphere of influence: the post-colonial state and the Catholic church. The underpinning epistemicide of global-scale coloniality is a compelling reason why social work in the margins should be more wholly embraced.