1. How can the social work profession in Tanzania continue to improve the well-being of people and promote social justice? 2.There is a need to encourage and support social workers on several levels in Tanzania. What issues of human rights are related to this task? 3. How can social workers living outside Tanzania support colleagues working in the region?

1. How can we create brave spaces for students in social work? 2. How can we use stories in the classroom? 3. How can brave spaces be made transferable to social work practice?

1. What are the necessary issues of engagement in rural, traditional, and agricultural communities to make a change? 2. What kind of justice actions are required from social workers engaged with agrarian communities? 3. How can social work learn from different community approaches to update professional social work education, theory, and practice? Can this learning promote local solutions to local problems?

1. Does social work in the Pacific differ from social work elsewhere? If yes, what is the difference? If no, what are the similarities? 2. What issues of human rights are discussed in this story? 3. What role does indigenous knowledge play in this story?

1. What does the term ‘healing journey’ mean to you? 2. In what ways do you currently feel social work is both a gift and a burden? 3. What lessons does Gloria’s story teach us about who is responsible for what? 4. What is the difference for you (if any) between disability and dis Ability?

1. What insights about different ways of becoming a social worker has Liam’s life story brought to the fore? 2. What stories have you met in your own social work practice that have affected your way of understanding what ought to be the core of social work? 3. How do you from your own experiences understand the expression ‘social work poetry’? How could it be an inspiration in your own work?

1. How can we work with stories in global social work? 2. How can we include ourselves as practitioners in storytelling? 3. How can we, as social workers, safeguard the integrity of those who tell us their stories in a good and trustworthy way? 4. Being a social worker is very much like being a collector of stories. How do we learn by stories, and add them to be powerful tools in our everyday practice?

The different needs, concerns, and preferences of the professions constituting the multidisciplinary team (MDT), including medicine, psychology, nursing, and social work, reflect the hybrid nature of psychiatry and the knowledge and skills required for clinical practice.

Neuroscience has evolved at impressive speed over recent decades. Many of its findings have relevance to psychiatry but are rarely directly translatable into clinical practice. Improving understanding of the psychological dimension of mental illness has led to new treatments with similar efficacy to medications. Our current approach to treating mental illness has also benefited greatly from insights from sociology and anthropology. The value conflicts relating to liberty and personal autonomy versus the medical value of restoring health and societal values around managing risk have led to the development of legal frameworks to aid clinical decision-making. These are, however, far from perfect, and values-based practice (VBP) principles could meaningfully contribute to improving them.

Although traditionally medicine sat at the top of the hierarchy in the MDT, this hierarchy has become more horizontal in recent decades. Close working together with social care is key, but there are pros and cons for both integrated and separate services. Values-based practice can ease some of the tensions in MDT working.

When Japanese people confronted the international community in the interwar era, their concerns and ideals about the fringes of the family and marriage were aimed at not only the Japanese metropole but also its colonies like Taiwan. Metropole–colony relations were not as clear as one might expect in that there was no direct institutional connection between Japan and Taiwan regarding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships. However, this chapter reconstructs their discursive links and reveals how cultural critics, social workers, jurists, and others simultaneously presented their competing visions of social progress in Japan and colonial Taiwan. In Japan, progress appeared in the visions of assuming and ensuring women’s personal independence, choice, and self-awareness; in Taiwan, Japanese colonizers defined progress as incorporating women into society. Despite the hierarchical divergence of the metropolitan and colonial perspectives, however, they converged on emphasizing women’s expected behavior as members of the family and society in the 1930s. Women became the sole bearers of progress, which ultimately engendered the empire.

This chapter explores the Member States’ use of EU private international family law in the protection of children with links abroad from abuse or neglect by their family. These measures include rules governing the assumption of jurisdiction over the parental responsibility of a child, including both private and public law measures. The chapter argues that the abused and neglected child was not a central focus when regulating the cross-border family and, as a consequence, legal borders between Member States’ family law systems retain considerable significance for these children. Whilst each Member State has provision in place for public law child protection measures, the methods and approach adopted vary significantly between legal systems, as do the potential substantive outcomes for children. The EU’s private international family law rules are designed to obscure these differences and this has presented difficulties in supporting cross-national cooperation over child protection. The political nature of these decisions has meant that focus on the welfare of the child may consequently be lost.

Social workers make decisions every day involving the protection of children and/or adults who are at risk of, or are experiencing, abuse and neglect, exercising power and authority derived from law. Social workers must act within the law: “doing things right.” Accountable, legally literate practice additionally includes standards from administrative law when statutory duties are used. However, decision-making frequently also raises ethical dilemmas, including whether, when, and how to intervene in people’s lives. Practice must, therefore, be ethically literate: “doing right things.” Human rights, equality, and social justice issues will also feature in social work decision-making: “right thinking.” This chapter presents a framework for social worker decision-making that is legally and ethically, but also emotionally, relationally, organizationally and knowledge, literate. It proposes that this framework is transferable across the different jurisdictions within which social workers practice, and that it helps social workers to make good as well as lawful decisions.

In this chapter we identify some aspects of Indigenous epistemologies (ways of knowing) and ontologies (ways of being) and apply them to the re-imagining of social work, grounded in contributions, experiences and knowledges shared by Indigenous scholars in the field. Social work has too often been part of the colonial project rather than the decolonising project, though in the twenty-first century the decolonisation of social work has emerged as a more important agenda. This chapter is concerned with Indigenous ways of knowing and being as representing important alternatives to Western modernity. We argue that to achieve re-imagining of social work requires social workers to adopt an epistemological shift that centres and values Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies as core, consciously and intentionally removing them from the margins that they have occupied in social work education and practice. We start the chapter with some notes on its authorship. We then briefly describe colonialism’s stifling of Indigenous epistemologies, after which we explore Indigenous ways of knowing and being and how they inform the re-imagining of social work.

This chapter argues that to practise social work in the Anthropocene it is crucial to decentre the human. This decentring does not involve devaluing the human but embedding their experience in the non-human world. We begin with a discussion of the Anthropocene along with the ecological crises and the growth in population, production and consumption as issues that underpin it. We highlight the importance of moving from anthropocentrism to Gaia in the way we understand the relationship between the human and the non-human world. This shift will enable social workers to rethink the social, the community and human rights in more ecocentric ways and will have implications in the ways social workers engage in activism and practice to affect social change.

This chapter examines how social work, as a profession with the heritage of Western Enlightenment modernity, must be re-imagined if it is to respond appropriately to the twenty-first-century crises and future uncertainties facing the world. It sets the scene for social work re-imagination by exploring the characteristics of Enlightenment modernity (which flourished from the late seventeenth to the eighteenth century) and the crises at hand and by exposing the inadequacies of a business-as-usual approach to the blatant unsustainability of the existing order. We argue that the future of social work lies in its revamping and recognising that it is about working with and in the social through a systemic perspective. The social must be brought back to social work by breaking out of the heritages of Enlightenment modernity and isolated individualism.

Social work has always existed in a society with opposing values and ideologies, but in the years of liberal consensus (up to the 1990s or early 2000s) it was possible for social workers to have a legitimacy, as the values of human rights and social justice, of caring for others, received tokenistic attention from political leaders and were seen by populations as important. Much has changed in the globalised world: in the 2020s even strong social democracies, exemplified by those in Scandinavia, are experiencing both the pressures of neoliberal globalisation and the threats of right-wing populism. In this chapter, we confront political contexts and discuss social work resistance to neoliberal, patriarchal structures and alternatives for progressive change.

Technological development typically has outcomes that can be perceived as both positive and negative for humanity. In a capitalist society, the benefits of new technology are often evaluated in economic terms, whereas the negative impacts are often evaluated in social, health-related or environmental terms – the externalities of conventional economics. The benefits of a new technology are often immediately obvious, while the negative consequences appear rather later. In this chapter, we examine four areas of major development or change: industrial technology, agricultural technology, medical technology, and digital and communication technology. Each has had, and continues to have, a significant impact on individuals, families, communities and societies, as well as on the understanding and practice of social work. These are discussed using the questions identified above: Who owns? Who uses? Who or what benefits? Who or what loses? This allows us to consider their implications for social work and for the re-imagining of social work in the twenty-first century.

Spirituality, religion and a sense of the sacred can be important areas for creativity and the re-imagining of social work. This chapter explores this arena, arguing that acknowledging and drawing on spirituality and sacredness are significant parts of social work and that to ignore them is to deny an important dimension of humanity. However, spirituality and sacredness are experienced and manifested in different ways and can be affected by dominant narratives in different cultural and political contexts and at different historical times. This chapter avoids making any claims as to the truth or otherwise of any forms of religion or spirituality and instead considers the role that a sense of the sacred and the spiritual can play in the re-imagining of social work.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the conventional view of science and of the scientific paradigm is under question. This chapter presents a perspective on science for social work practice that is not against science per se but that critiques positivist science’s heavy emphasis on evidence-based practice and draws instead on alternative, more fluid and creative approaches. Science is, of course, important for its insights and its ways of studying the world, and to attack science is to allow anti-scientific arguments a legitimacy they do not deserve. The approach here values science and scientific inquiry but not to the point of denying the importance of other ways of knowing and being.

Social work stands for the values of humanity. Such a statement would go unchallenged by social workers throughout the world. Yet in this chapter we consider the values of humanity in some detail, recognising that they are both complex and contested, and that humanity is not to be idealised but can be brutally destructive. In pursuing this discussion, we show how a deeper and wider exploration of humanity can be an important source of inspiration for creative social work and can enhance social work’s advocacy of the values of humanity in the contemporary context, where much that seemed to be settled has become unsettled and where people often feel less like rational decision-making beings optimising their wellbeing and more isolated, bewildered and uncertain in a world of paradox and confusion.