This book will inspire the next generation of social work practitioners to integrate research into their everyday social justice practice. Through highlighting the centrality of values to the task of research and the possibilities for enacting social justice through our research practice, it argues for respectful, meaningful and just relationships with the people with whom we do research and build knowledge; acknowledge the ongoing impact of colonialism; respect diversity; and commit to working towards social change. With First Nations Worldviews - ways of knowing, ways of being, ways of doing - weaved throughout the text, this book seeks to both reclaim ancient knowledges and disrupt Western research traditions.
Divided into three sections
- a strong rationale for the importance of research skills to social work practice;
- step-by-step guides on doing social research aimed at novice researchers;
- a series of examples of applied social justice projects
Bringing the authors' passion for finding new ways 'doing' research and contesting traditional research paradigms of objectivity and the scientific, it advocates for knowledge building that is participatory, emancipatory, and empowered.
It will be required reading for all social work students at both the undergraduate and masters level as well as professionals looking to put research into practice.
About the Author: Margot Rawsthorne (Associate Professor) has lectured in community development with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney since 2005. Her research has focused on the experience of inequality, particularly shaped by gender, location, housing and sexuality. Her research aims to create social change.
Emma Tseris is a Lecturer in Social Work and Policy Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, where her research and teaching areas include critical mental health theory, mental health and gender inequality, and narrative research methodologies.
Amanda Howard teaches and research in all things related to communities at the University of Sydney. That includes encouraging closer, fairer and more inclusive connections, community planning for disasters, and mobilising community power. Her research is about getting unheard stories and voices on the policy and practice agenda.
Mareese Terare is a Bundjalung Goenpul Women, Mother, grandmother. She is currently employed as an academic in the Social Work Program at the University of Sydney. Her specialist areas of research and teaching consists of Aboriginal healing frameworks and ways, interpersonal trauma, counselling, social justice, children's rights and human rights.
Alankaar Sharma is a social work researcher and educator. He currently works as an academic at the University of Wollongong, NSW. His research and teaching are inspired by social justice, feminism, and critical social work. Confronting and ending oppression against marginalised people is at the heart of his social justice-oriented social work practice.
