The purpose of the Independent Living Fund Scotland is to empower disabled people to control their own support systems. Established as a ‘closed’ fund in 2015, it has been threatened with eventual closure through attrition. In response, a campaign was organised to open the fund, bolstered by two ‘social return on investment’ evaluations. As a result, the fund was opened in April 2024. This article discusses the background of the Independent Living Fund Scotland, celebrates its opening and attributes its success to being a purpose-led organisation that helps disabled people live purposeful lives.

The impacts of human activity on ecosystems are increasingly evident through ecological degradation and climate change. Despite this, in many jurisdictions across the world, action to address and curtail destructive human activities is slow and resisted at all levels. In this article, we suggest that this resistance is connected to deep ecological grief. We introduce a dual approach to understanding ecological grief, using concepts of unprecedented and unacknowledged grief. Unprecedented grief is felt in response to the loss of our ecosystems and unacknowledged grief connected to the anticipated loss of lifestyle necessary to curtail destructive human behaviour. Drawing upon an ecosocial work praxis, this article then explores how we can use these understandings of ecological grief to take action and make radical changes to prefigure healthier relationships with each other and our ecosystems.

Climate change is a universal challenge that affects every country, community and individual. Importantly, its discourse requires collective participation from all academic disciplines, professionals, government sectors, classes and persons at a larger scale, not elite-imposed values. By adopting the critical paradigm, this article reviews the relevance of Ubuntu philosophy as an epistemic value of ordinary African people and of social work, which needs to be appreciated in climate change discourse. Most importantly, the hegemony of the imperialist values of the elite is explicated herein through the adoption of the narrative literature review method. The discussions highlight the nexus and relevance of a climate change discourse that should also be co-driven by social work and ordinary African people through the Ubuntu philosophy. For sustainable livelihoods, this article argues that Ubuntu, as an Afrocentric attitude, challenges the Western values of individuality and living for today without considering others and future generations.

This article explores the impacts of the neoliberal university on Australian social work education and academics. It presents a critical analysis of empirical data derived from a national qualitative study involving 30 interviews with Australian social work educators. In particular, it discusses the rise of managerial-administrative control within universities, the impacts on teaching and curriculum (including the emergence of student consumer culture), the implications for research (which, like education, is funnelled away from a critical agenda) and the adverse impacts on social work academics’ workloads, their collegiality and their health and well-being. Findings are discussed in the context of changes by the Australian Association of Social Workers to the 2024 Australian Social Work Education and Accreditation Standards, which may have serious consequences for social work educators and education if adopted in their current form. Social work academics’ resistance to the neoliberal logic is also briefly explored.

This article explores the integration of social justice principles for a theoretical reconceptualization of trauma-informed practice (TIP) in schools. This involves exploring the role of educators and school social workers in promoting socially just TIP within primary education, a landscape that is currently dominated by the influence of neoliberal ideals. Interprofessional collaboration between social workers and educators has the potential to bring about a significant transformation in the way trauma is addressed, providing critical implications for individuals working in school settings. This article discusses how integrating social justice principles into school practices can strengthen the application of TIP.

Recent political changes in Sweden are undermining social work as a human rights profession by accentuating it once again as nationalised and citizenship oriented. This commentary addresses the Tidö Agreement that immerses social work into a politics of surveillance of undocumented migrants. Writing from the perspective of a lecturer who works for internationalisation in a university setting, I provide critical reflections on what internationalisation of social work might mean in the contemporary context and outline some strategies as ways forward.

Mindful of the risk of seeming to cover ‘old ground’, this article strives to open new ground, or make old ground fresh again, by regarding the ‘service user’ label through critical constructivist lenses. Specifically, this article seeks to demonstrate how the agentive, self-determining qualities attached to ‘service users’, as opposed to ‘clients’ or ‘customers’, are complicated by more pejorative connotations ascribed to the term in everyday, social work and neoliberal discourses while highlighting how words matter. Not only do tensions between and within discourses register and generate tensions in practice, but, especially, language also constitutes social reality and the people and things making it up. Although frightening, yet inescapably ‘normal’, instances of structural violence and harsh austerity measures must be regarded in the context of discourse, albeit while not being determined by it, questioning common-sense discourses and the practices they index may produce possibilities for creating alternate languages and practices.

This article is based on a seminar involving participants with experience of Roma-related service delivery, activism and knowledge production and explores the relevance of asset-based community development, radical social work and inclusive community development approaches in addressing challenges in Roma communities in Central Eastern Europe, with particular reference to Hungary. Some key questions in the discussion are as follows. Is there scope for co-production between local and national government and Roma community groups? What kind of cooperation is possible in the revised legislative framework after 2010 in Hungary, which some critics argue has helped establish forms of authoritarianism in Hungary? Can radical interventions avert paternalist, assimilatory and discriminatory culture-of-poverty approaches? And to what extent are authoritarianism and xenophobia undermining emancipatory approaches to social and community work?

North America has witnessed an unprecedented level of devastation wrought by the toxic-drug-poisoning crisis – otherwise referred to as the ‘opioid’ or ‘overdose’ epidemic – with Canada witnessing over 47,000 fatalities from January 2016 to March 2024. Structured by a series of propositions, this article critically interrogates the conspicuous under-representation of harm reduction and substance use education in social work curricula across Canada, a country that has similarly seen skyrocketing mortality rates resulting from the displacement of heroin with incredibly strong and dangerous synthetic opioid analogues like fentanyl. Given the crucial role that social workers could play in ameliorating the impact of Canada’s toxic, tainted drug supply, this commentary thus asserts that in light of current conditions, it is imperative for social work regulatory bodies – namely, the national Canadian Association of Social Workers – to begin explicitly embracing and promoting the principles of harm reduction in an effort to better equip social workers for direct, equitable engagement with people who use drugs.

This article discusses user participation and social service responsiveness to citizen voices. Drawing on 57 qualitative interviews conducted in France, the evidence collected sheds light on the perception of social service users with regard to participatory processes, the obstacles that prevent them from obtaining institutional responses and the implicit and explicit tactics they mobilise in order to achieve change. The empirical material suggests that when official channels for participation are non-existent or fail to bring about effects, users may mobilise parallel tactics that include identifying institutional shortcuts to bypass unresponsive intermediaries, organising collectively to influence power dynamics, reclaiming participatory spaces and choosing to renounce social support altogether. These tactics are interpreted as a practice of agency and a form of resistance exercised by service users faced with epistemic silencing.