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This book stages a provocative dialogue between social work, health and social care and contemporary philosophy in order to inform theory and practice in a complex and challenging world.
Today, the social world is marked by deep-rooted complexities, tensions and challenges. Health workers and social workers are constantly reminded to employ critical thinking to navigate this world through their practice. But given how many of these challenges pose significant problems for the theories that these subjects have traditionally drawn upon, should we now be critical of critical thinking - its assumptions, its basis and its aspirations - itself? Arguing that health and social work theory must reconsider its deep-rooted assumptions about criticality in order to navigate complex neoliberalism, post-truth and the relationship between language and late capitalism, it examines how the fusion of theory and practice can re-imagine critical thinking for health, social care and social work. It will be of interest to all scholars, students and professionals of social work and health and social care.
List of contents
Introduction: against critical thinking? 1.Critical atmospheres: where are we now with facts, critique and care? 2.The rhetoric of urgency: tensions between critique and practice. 3.Autonomy, critique, and consensus. 4.Placing the review under review: reconciling critique with assemblage in safeguarding reviews. 5.The power of critique: looking back and forwards with Foucault. 6.The vulnerability of critique.
About the author
Tom Grimwood is Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Cumbria, where he leads the Health and Society Knowledge Exchange (HASKE) within the Centre for Research in Health and Society. He is the author of The Problem with Stupid: Ignorance, Intellectuals, Post-Truth and Resistance (2023), The Shock of the Same: An Anti-Philosophy of Clichés (2020) and Key Debates in Social Work and Philosophy (Routledge, 2016).
Summary
This book stages a provocative dialogue between social work, health and social care and contemporary philosophy in order to inform theory and practice in a complex and challenging world.
