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 article explores the problems and potential of funded short-term cross-sector partnerships to address technological deficits in the nonprofit sector by engaging with the partners of a concluded project. The partnership case study that forms the backbone of this article was a three-year nationally funded nonprofit-industry-academic partnership. The ob- jective of the partnership was to increase the data collection capacity of a national nonprofit organization and its affiliate centres through the development of a web-based app. This article highlights the challenges and differing experiences of nonprofit-industry-academic partnerships more generally, and technology-development partnerships more specifically.

As a means to support wider engagement with the trouble with humanism for social work, this chapter provides an advanced overview and signposting that locates the post-anthropocentric turn in relation to traditions and debates in critical social theory that are likely to be more familiar in Anglophone traditions of social work. There are three parts to the chapter. Part I gives a general overview of humanism, anti-humanism and post-anthropocentrism in theory and in social work, and includes a table in which these overviews are further located. Part II considers the particular/general dichotomy of humanist hierarchies in relation to the social question that organises social work and speculates on how this organising question is changing with the environmental crisis. Part III identifies a few promising ways into the logic and stakes of these debates. Overall, the chapter is intended as an invitation into dense and ongoing transdisciplinary debates that are not yet common in social work.

In this paper I raise two questions for greater collective disciplinary attention: What are the conditions of existence and the conditions of possibility of critical and justice-emphatic academic social work in the Canadian university system these days? And moreover, how might we—the “we” who read critical social theory and share a discipline—attempt to be accountable to these shifting conditions? I engage these questions with the help of critical literatures as well as an exploratory survey in which educators teaching in schools of social work in Canada were asked to identify texts and bodies of knowledge that they consider pivotal to understanding social work and social justice. Discussing educators’ responses, I identify a few nodes of thinking that would benefit from greater disciplinary attention, and I suggest one way we might focus on these shared problematics.

This paper is about the changing imaginations of social work in an increasingly entangled world. It is also about the ways in which literatures shared across time and space encourage us to identify with larger collectivities. My central argument is that if social work is to find a larger vision in the wake of the failure of a range of modern progress narratives, we must engage differently with the challenge posed by multiplying and sometimes conflicting knowledge communities. Thinking with contemporary debates in transdisciplinary critical social theory, I nominate and explore a number of alternative heuristics-'generational problematic,' 'translational space,' and 'imagined communities'-in support of future work on the uneven temporal and spatial communities of affiliation that reproduce and change what social work is, or could be, about. I conclude with theoretical suggestions, and some thoughts toward how social work education might better support incoming generations to locate themselves within the broader life-course of the discipline and profession.

Contemporary iterations of the youth question present social work with a generative challenge to imagine the education needs of youth as social work students, and at the same time, to imagine the intervention needs of youth as service users. This paper engages this challenge through an empirical case that confronted us with our own preconceived understandings of young people and social work: a funded project to support the program evaluation capacity of a national network of youth centers in Canada. Working through three tensions that emerged in this work-(1) assumptions about youth and workers, (2) participation as a best-practice, and (3) how local data collection practices are networked to ambiguous, ongoing social processes-we reflect project learning and youth studies literature together to explore the possibilities of 'critical inquiry skills' in social work education. As we develop the concept here, critical inquiry skills are a means to encourage young people to see themselves as simultaneously within and outside of the categories and approaches they are taught and subjected to, and by extension, to invite and support newcomers to make the discipline and profession their own.

and class, and the temporally cyclical nature of ‘the housing question’. She aptly constructs the book so that the reader is guided to understand that the Bedroom Tax is a process not a single government action that arrived unanticipated with the Welfare Reform Act of 2012. Bogue’s deliberate, dignified yet impassioned writing highlights how the Bedroom Tax is simply the most recent manifestation in a long history of symbolic and material violence enacted against the most vulnerable and precarious members of society. This is exemplified in Chapter 3, where Bogue deftly explains that ‘the Bedroom Tax was introduced into lives that were already financially insecure and precarious’ (p. 47). The Divisive State of Social Policy is eminently relevant to those interested in critical social policy analysis. While Bogue is primarily writing about the implications of the Bedroom Tax on social housing residents, her argumentation is far broader and provides and insightful critique on normalised precarity as part of a neoliberal regime. Indeed, the author adroitly illustrates how the imposition of the Bedroom Tax represents a neoliberal trend whereby ‘individuals are subordinated while simultaneously being cast as agents of their own fate’ (p. 91). Her ethnographic research, interwoven with a clear knowledge of policy and academic literature, makes the book timely and insightful. Bogue incorporates into her writing contemporary issues such as the rise of far-right nationalist politics, and a fear of the ‘other’. Clearly, this book will be of interest and relevance to readers of CSP and to scholars and activists located within the fields of sociology, human geography and social policy, and all, in fact, who are concerned with the evolution of precarity and marginality.

A largely unexplored complexity in the lives of youth who have experienced homeless is the presence of intellectual, developmental and/or learning disabilities. Although emerging research shows that youth with cognitive disabilities are more likely to become homeless and that rates of cognitive disabilities are higher among the homeless population than the population in general, exploring the intersection of disability and homelessness for youth has not been a priority. In this study, a critical disability and systems failure lens is brought to bear on the vulnerability of youth who experience this intersection. Based on interviews with key informants in the disability, homelessness, education, employment and child welfare sectors in three sites in Ontario, Canada, the invisibility of disability among homeless youth is brought to light. We explore the ways youth with a disability in the homelessness sector are made vulnerable, the insurmountable barriers to getting access to the requisite assessment for disability services and the siloed nature of the homelessness and disability service sectors. An argument is made that working outside the box to assist youth to navigate significant system disjunctures is insufficient.

In this paper, I take as my problematic the reproduction and renewal of justice cultures within social work after the fall of left progress narratives. My point of departure is the question of how our applied discipline might imagine and practise and teach justice when there are no guarantees that we are actually good people or that our justice work does not cause harm. Orienting to social work as a world-making project that exceeds us all, I weave scholarship from social work historians together with contemporary debates among the left to propose a form of reparative historical practice that might stimulate the justice imaginations of our field. Anchoring this discussion around the concepts of keywords, structures of feelings and disciplinary desire, I theorise some of the ways in which the histories and justice imaginations of individuals and generations converge within our discipline. Emphasising the relational nature of this proposed historical practice, I argue social work must make into a productive knowledge the fact that it is impossible to act in the world without ever causing harm. Allowing ourselves to be cut by this knowledge is necessary if we are to repair what is left in social work.