In the context of environmental crisis and ascendant advanced technologies, the question of how to live in more-than-human worlds is imperative. To develop a practical theorisation of what this might mean, this article brings Spinoza's Ethics into conversation with the traditional ways of living practised by Scotland's Gaelic peoples. Together, they offer the means of contemplating a relational, more-than-human ethics. This has relevance to social work scholarship, critical of abstract codes that prioritise human objectives. Spinoza's ethics and Gaelic ways of living originated pre-Enlightenment, before Descartes placed mind above body and before Kant's transcendent codes. Both offer a view within the messy interdependence of lives that cannot be extracted from more-than-human interdependence with land, sea, plants, weather and creatures. The resistance of Gaelic modes of living that is conveyed as much through material environment as culture indicates the sustainability of their relational approach to living. This relational approach is not a God's eye view from above but is a view of infinity found only in the immersive tangle of material relations. This article does not offer a blueprint or model for social work but is a provocation to rethink the social.

This article problematizes the disciplinary 'black-boxing' of the concept of neoliberalism, and the concomitant idealization of community as antidote, within social work scholarship. Our central claim is that an oppressive neoliberalism/authentic community dichotomy cannot adequately represent the major problems and solutions facing state-sponsored social work today. We argue that the thought behind 'neoliberalism' is much more complex and nuanced than is widely assumed, and that making this complexity visible provides a means of developing forms of critique crucial to addressing the contemporary problems of increasingly illiberal societies.

In this paper we explore the role of precarity theory in bringing new perspectives to public mental health. The paper draws on a qualitative, participatory research study carried out in Glasgow that illuminates the entangled and complex relations between the social, bio-political, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions that produce mental health and ill health. Through the accounts of Sassy Queen, Tony, Simba, John, and Rhianna, we explore the attrition of everyday lives that are lived in constant states of crisis, the forms of precarity that it precipitates, and how this plays out for them concerning how they talk about and experience 'mental health'. Their experience provides an alternative vantage point to understanding mental distress to those which are made possible through recourse to prevalent social determinant and behavioural models of public health. The paper concludes that the operations of the political as everyday biopolitics must become more visible within public health, and this requires interdisciplinary and narrative approaches to fully understand the border zone between macro-level politics and the biopolitics of everyday life.

This article contributes a comparative review of social work in Canada and Scotland to international conversations about social work and the environment. The 'environmental question' of the 21st century is a radical challenge to social work developed in relation to the 'social question' of the 19th century. Work to begin to include the natural environment within high-income state social work can expect to encounter established infrastructures of thinking and doing that will be difficult to shift. We, therefore, compare guiding social work policy documents and identify points of tension that are likely to be shared across wealthy national contexts.

This special issue of Social Work & Society includes contributions made to an online conference held in June 2021 that invited speculative engagement with the question What social work does the world need now? The aim of the conference was to create space for uncommon and potentially less intelligible ideas and problematics, and in so doing, foster disciplinary engagement with the possible futures of social work in the context of major societal, environmental and technological changes. To lay out the landscape for the articles that follow, in this editorial, we explore the meaning of the future, as it relates to the trajectory of modernism, through the historical philosophy of Reinhart Koselleck. At this juncture, where existential threats from environmental degradation and new technologies, dominate a zeitgeist of existential angst we question the norms that brought humanity to this point. With scholars from science and philosophy, we conclude that modernism has been destablised, and its norms of human exceptionalism and eternal progress have expired. We argue that in this context, to be of use, social work, a progeny of modernism, must revisit the terms of its relationships and its purpose.

Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s conceptualization of ‘affirmative biopolitics’, this article examines the relationship between bedbugs and humans in the Glasgow neighbourhood of Govanhill. Through an analysis of ethnographic field notes and interviews with people who live in the area, this article traces their experiences from first encounters. The trajectory of this experience shows a shift from a desire to immunize their homes through total annihilation of the creatures to the more pragmatic position of learning how to live with them through an orientation toward ‘shared vulnerability’. This case study raises interesting questions for biopolitical theory: how can we conceive of affirmative biopolitics when the limitations of species being are evident, and is it possible to conceive of a multi or even interspecies munus or obligation?

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by material social relations. In the now extensive literature on biopolitics, our biopolitical era is characterized by the blending and mixing of what were previously thought of as separate realms: life is biologized, politics is biologized and biology is politicized, life and politics have been economized, and making life is intertwined with making death. This article provides a general overview of two strains of these biopolitical entanglements. It begins by examining the largely French and Italian focus on how politics and life have become economized in contemporary neoliberalism. We then turn to the mainly Anglo-American focus on the biologization of life. It concludes by taking up the central problem that arises from the messiness of biopolitics: whither the political of the biopolitical economy of life? Is there such a thing as the political proper in our era? If not, then what type of politics must be deployed to address the issues of our biopolis?

‘Panic’ is a theme I am familiar with in my work with women who regularly experience extremely distressing situations. It is a natural response to fear, and one that can be managed. Panic of itself is, arguably, morally neutral; how panic is fuelled, steered and exploited is not. Woven through the discussion in this chapter is an interest in moving toward a productive understanding of the function of ‘moral panic’, in order that it might create stimulus for positive change rather than being steered towards the imperative to cling to problematic norms. This interest underpins the discussion of themes derived from the chapters in this part: the constitution of ‘the deviant other’ and the discharge of moral responsibility. I then consider the Scottish Government’s policy on violence against women, Equally Safe (Scottish Government, 2014a), to explore how such themes become operationalised in the context of my practice as a criminal justice social worker in a ‘women’s’ service. Each of the chapters in this byte has illuminated a view of the ‘undesirable other’ as a prerequisite for ‘moral panic’. Furedi’s Chapter One focused on the contemporary ‘other’, ‘the paedophile’; Benson and Charsley, and Clark, in Chapters Three and Four, respectively, highlighted the ‘othering’ of those who are perceived as ‘not like us’ for reasons of cultural difference. These three are, arguably, the most emotive of panics discussed, as they portray clearly recognisible human actors who become readily stereotyped as a homogeneous group. Grumett’s discussion of animal welfare in Chapter Two is another emotive topic, as those believed to mistreat animals readily become associated with other immoral practices.

Flexibility and change are typically viewed as endemic features of late modernity, leading to increased emphasis on the importance of transition during the adult life course. The paper examines experiences of transition for eight contributors to a research project that collected and analysed life histories as the basis for an understanding of learning in relation to identity, agency and change in adult life. Four of the interviewees report mired transitions, and four report on transitions that became mobile after a period of immobility. The paper identifies a number of factors which can restrict movement, structural and internal, real and imaginary, that are described in these stories. We then set out our socio-cultural understanding of the 'betwixt and between' status that Turner calls liminality, suggesting that many do not experience liminality as wholly emancipatory. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for lifelong learning strategies, which need to attend to the weight of what Alheit calls 'biographicity' in understanding learners' lives. While this requires acknowledgement of the role of informal learning, it does not however justify understating the importance of formal adult learning.

This paper draws on the author's experience as a student social worker in the Scottish criminal justice social work system to explore questions of relational ethics and the challenges of mobilising an ethically symmetrical relationship in contexts with pre-existing power imbalances. This experience enables a critique of risk management models and makes a contribution to desistance theory.

This is a lively and engaging collection, which draws on empirical research to ‘interrogate, challenge and question notions of difference and the “other”’ (p. 9). I read this book whilst working on data from a research project exploring the educational strategies of the Black Caribbean heritage middle class, and found it helpful, both empirically and theoretically. Its discussions of intersectionality spoke to the position in which the respondent parents in our project found themselves; that is, using their class resources to try and mitigate and avoid for their children the low expectations and stereotyping of Black children, especially boys, that are ever-present possibilities in a racially unequal education system and wider society. This edited collection of ten chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion by the editors, emerged from a conference on ‘how intersectionality can be understood... within the different fields and spaces of education’ (p. 1). The aim is to ‘theorise difference’ (p. 2). The contributors Leonardo, Gillborn, Rampersad, Maisuria, Dewan, Morrison, Shain, Kitching, Chakrabarty, and Youdell, as well as Kalwant Bhopal and John Preston as editors are an excellent mixture of very established people in the field and newer voices. Most of the articles focus on intersections of class, race and gender, but the intersection of these dimensions with sexuality, disability, and particularly religion also feature. The authors’ themes include discussions of critical race theory, Judith Butler and queer theory, poststructural and multi-cultural approaches. These bodies of theory are used to analyse the diversities and inequalities of educational experiences, which are illustrated by studies of young people of Black Caribbean, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi and mixed heritage, as well as White ethnicities, and immigrants to Ireland from a variety of countries of origin. The issues that are discussed also include Whiteness, Marxism, inclusion and exclusion, social class, neo-liberalism, gender roles, hetero-normativity, pigmentocracy, and ethnic capital (drawing on Bourdieu), amongst others. In a review of this length, I cannot do justice to all 12 chapters, so I will confine myself to discussing one or two themes. One key theme, addressed to differing degrees of explicitness by several authors, is the incomplete and inadequate premise of a liberal ‘cosmopolitanism’ (Dewan), that promotes and promises diversity and equality. The authors in this collection point up the failings in this, by revealing the complexity and fluidity of relationships between different social dimensions, and illustrating the workings of power in their accounts of the way different social groups strive to position themselves and are themselves positioned. Another key theme is the relationship, within an intersectional framework, of race in relation to other dimensions of identity. Zeus Leonardo and David Gillborn, for instance, argue that class theorists and policy makers ‘dissolve race into class relations’ (Leonardo, p. 14). Preston and Bhopal (2011) take up this point, as they discuss their commitment to ‘foregrounding’ race within their analysis. They note: