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
