Making Acquaintance: Compatibility of Critical Disability Studies Conventions with Child Protection and Welfare Social Work Practice in Ireland

Abstract

Substantial research evidence alludes to concerns, practical impediments, inefficiencies and injustices in Child Protection and Welfare (CPW) work with children with disabilities. Meanwhile, individualised perspectives and bio-medical discourses that have traditionally monopolised social work practice with disability are increasingly viewed as inadequate and reductive. In this context, particularly instrumental is the complexity and non-materiality that disability entails. As a cross-cutting intervention into these predicaments, this paper explores the practicalities of tentative links between CPW social work with children with disabilities, and the theoretical innovations of Critical Disability Studies (CDS), alluded to elsewhere. The proposition is, that three conditions of possibility may foster space for the effective integration of CDS conventions into CPW social work. These are instructive and refer respectively to: opening space for integration; application as an aid to reflective practice; and sensitising to nuanced and immaterial forces of disablement. The intention is, that abstract theory and non-materialist insights from CDS may be productively disruptive, and repurposed, for CPW students and practitioners seeking new ways to think through the present predicaments.