No continuing city: A postmodern story of social work

Abstract

Rural social work is examined through the lens of postmodernism. Questioning modernist framings of rural social work as peripheral and deficit practice, the article offers an alternative reading that rural social work highlights the importance of reflective practitioner selves in achieving best practice in context. Working out from the actual and bodily lived experience of practitioners is suggested as a methodology of critical ethnography that might serve to bridge the gap between practitioners and academics in social work the gap between knowing and doing. Narratives of work done by a particular social worker, Don Gordon, in the Kimberley region of Australia during the seventies are used to convey the case for a postmodern reframing of social work. Practitioners need to work effectively across a range of contexts and cultures. Global social justice and humanitarian ends of social work often require local means for their achievement.