MAKING TRANSPARENT THE EMBODIED LIFE AND SKILLED KNOW-HOW OF SOCIAL WORK: PRACTICE AND RESEARCH

Abstract

Social Work is at its core a qualitative, life-centered practice, where assessments and interventions take place in the interconnected worlds and experiences of client and family, and in the engaged, interpretive and reflective position of social worker. The understanding of social work as a practice of advocacy and experience is masked by the positivist research agendas of social work departments, institutional policy and research entities that may define social work for practitioner and researcher alike. This article reclaims social work as a myriad set of practices that inherently and also self-consciously recognizes the client as a person for whom things matter, whose concerns are reflected in the expression of their day to day living, their approach to problems (and what defines a problem), and finally, recognizes the social person whose mattering is reflective of their world and the persons in it. To do this, interpretive phenomenology is used as a framework to introduce concepts of personhood, mattering, being, embodiment and situation to illustrate how social work already uses these concepts, and how social work research can recognize and affirm the power of on-the-ground, social work caring practices.

KEYWORDS: interpretive phenomenology. social work. lifeworld. Praxis. social work research.