My co-author, Dilip Karki, and I are excited to share our recent published research article with you. In many ways it distils evidence of why love matters in social work and how love is needed for justice to matter. I introduce the publication by sharing some of my backstory to how love became such a big focus of my research and teaching for more than two decades. Early on the idea of a love ethic in social work education was recognised when I gained the award of a Doctor of Philosophy from Edith Cowan University in 2002. Since that time I’ve adapted the idea in applied research of various kinds and in turn this has inspired me in my current efforts to build a theory of love. These podcasts record my thinking, who inspires me and why love is both an ethic and set of actions needed when it is absent in situations of violence and injustice.
I detail the main points of the article and share how a systematic literature review was undertaken to find 16 articles in social work journals that explored love in practice and in theory development. Dilip and I wanted to know what the current state of argument and research is on love in social work and whether it could inform an anti-oppressive (pro-justice) ethical positionality. While it is an emerging field of scholarship, the selected articles show how important love was in their work. In one article, their country’s government (Norway) has legislated for love to be used in working with young vulnerable people. In another, it was found that the young research participants were asking for love from the social workers as they had so little experience of it in their lives. Cautions were also offered regarding the risk of an overly emotional interpretation of love devoid of its broader promise of enabling a power analysis underpinning discrimination and oppression.
We argue that with all the viewpoints considered it could be useful to think of love as an ethic, in the tradition of bell hooks’s seminal writing, providing a guide for further dialogue and scholarship.
If you would like to access a copy of the published article, please use this link:
https://academic.oup.com/bjsw/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bjsw/bcaf113/8166617
Let us know what you think or drop us a note if you have questions or would like me to elaborate more on any points or the overall research project.
Thank you for your time and interest.
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