Be proud to be a lazy radical! This textbook makes the case for a radical approach to social work that can be embraced by everyone. It's an approach based on real empathy and an understanding of oppression, of managerialism, of the moral heart of social work, of humanism and of the effects of neoliberal hegemony. Jane Fenton provides a model of radical practice for students and social workers who are committed to 'doing the right thing', and who want to develop their own framework for practice. This book will appeal to students who are activists, but want to frame their individual-level practice in a meaningful way, and to those who are non-activist and non-political but simply want to be good social workers. It will give a political and moral understanding of social work practice and lead to confident, value-based and enjoyable social work.

This book is full of ideas about how social work education can confront the individualising and often blaming form of social work that neoliberalism ushered in four decades ago. Radical social work is an approach to social work that has, at its heart, the departure from solely behavioural, moral or psychological understanding of service users’ problems. Social work had originally been concerned with the moral character of people in trouble (usually poor people), making a clear division between those who were ‘deserving’ of help and those who were ‘undeserving’. The rise of science and the ‘psy’ disciplines then led to psychological explanations for the difficulties people found themselves in. Both explanations for social problems – moral and psychological – with their narrow focus on the individual have been enjoying a renaissance in recent times with the neoliberal self-sufficiency narrative (moral) and the more recent focus on trauma (psychological). Radical social work challenges those explanations, concerned as it is with the circumstances a person might find themselves in – poverty, poor housing, poor education, high crime rates, and lack of opportunities of all kinds. This book is a step towards resurrecting radical social work principles, and it urges us to think about how social work education can be reshaped to that end. Radical Challenges for Social Work Education is a significant new contribution to social work practice and theory, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Politics, Education, Social Work, Sociology, Public Policy, Development Studies, Anthropology, and Human Geography. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Social Work Education.

“This country's leading hell-raiser" (The Nation) shares his impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.” First published in 1971 and written in the midst of radical political developments whose direction Alinsky was one of the first to question, this volume exhibits his style at its best. Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.

This is the first book to provide social workers with an applicable model for radical practice. Through examining the current state of social work in the UK and looking at the radical approaches that have developed over the years, this book explores some of the opportunities that exist for a radical social work.