Routledge Advances in Social Work
AI and the Disruption of Welfare: Challenges for Social Work Education and Practice
1st Edition
Edited
By Goetz Ottmann, Carolyn Noble
November 03, 2025
This book with 22 chapters from eminent scholars, focuses on the role of AI-enabled technology in surveillance and coercive ‘welfare’ bringing into view how advanced technology is used to shift the boundaries between welfare, penal, and carceral state and its very real impact on social work ...
The Foster Family in the Service of the Foster Child
1st Edition
By Lidia Pietruszka, Andrzej Łuczyński
October 20, 2025
This monograph shows the contribution of foster families to the system of social care for a child permanently or temporarily deprived of the biological family environment. Adopting a theoretical and empirical approach that draws on survey research conducted with 212 foster families, it shows their...
Social Support of Young People in and after Residential Care: Is Someone There for You?: An International Perspective
1st Edition
Edited
By Eunice Magalhães, Shalhevet Attar-Schwartz
May 21, 2025
Decades of research highlight the protective tole of strong, positive, and secure relationships for children and young people at risk, both in the community and in out-of-home care. This volume offers an in-depth exploration of social support among young people in residential care and after leaving...
Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Residential Care for Children and Youth: A Good Place to Grow
1st Edition
By Bruce B. Henderson
May 06, 2025
Is residential care 'inherently harmful'? This book argues that this conventional wisdom is wrong and is, itself, harmful to a significant number of children and youth. The presumptive view is based largely on overgeneralizations from research with infants and very young children raised in ...
Using Language, Fiction, and Story in Social Work Education
1st Edition
By Dara Sampson, Amanda Howard
May 06, 2025
This book provides an accessible, research-informed text for social work educators, students, and practitioners interested in the use of story to engender the connection of human experiences with ideas, theories, and skills. A broad lens is also taken to the ways in which fiction has been used as a...
Utopian Thinking and Social Work
1st Edition
By Chris Horsell
February 03, 2025
This book highlights the importance of employing imaginative sensibilities to thinking and action in social work and social policy practice. Exploring the question of how ideas about utopia and utopian method can be used in social work practice and policy practice to address social inequalities, it...
Against Critical Thinking in Health, Social Care and Social Work: Reframing Philosophy for Professional Practice
1st Edition
By Tom Grimwood
December 18, 2024
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 ...
International Perspectives on Parenting Support and Parental Participation in Children and Family Services
1st Edition
Edited
By Carmel Devaney, Rosemary Crosse
December 18, 2024
This book provides an account of parenting support initiatives in children and family services from a number of jurisdictions, paying particular attention to their impact on both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ outcomes for participants and to the inclusion of parents in the design and delivery of these supports...
Systems Complexity in Child Protection and Welfare: Policy, Leadership, Practice and Evaluation
1st Edition
By Aisling Gillen, John Canavan, Carmel Devaney, Caroline McGregor
December 03, 2024
This book examines systems complexity theory and specifically, system and dynamic characteristics of complexity, with a key focus on self/organisation/emergence/adaptation; path-dependence; and bifurcation. Exploring systems complexity at the heart of child protection and welfare policymaking, ...
Social Work, Social Welfare, and Social Development in Nigeria: A Postcolonial Perspective
1st Edition
By Mel Gray, Solomon Amadasun
October 09, 2024
This groundbreaking book provides a comprehensive account of social work, social welfare, and social development in Nigeria from a postcolonial perspective. It examines the historical development of social work and social welfare and the colonial legacies affecting contemporary social welfare ...
Language Discordant Social Work in a Multilingual World: The Space Between
1st Edition
By Hilde Fiva Buzungu
October 08, 2024
Based on ethnographic observations of encounters between social workers and people with whom they do not have a shared language, this book analyzes the impact of language discordance on the quality of professional service provision. Exploring how street-level bureaucrats navigate the landscape of ...
Revitalising Critical Reflection in Contemporary Social Work Research, Practice and Education
1st Edition
Edited
By Christian Franklin Svensson, Pia Ringø
August 26, 2024
Globally, social work faces increasingly complex cultural, political, economic, legal, organisational, technological and professional conditions. Critically reflecting on the subject, this book heightens critical consciousness among social work researchers, educators, practitioners and students ...