Invitation to contribute abstracts for the following proposal

Title: The Handbook of Contemporary Issues in Social Work: Critical Social Work in a Fragmenting world

Editors: Carolyn Noble, Donna Baines, Bindi Bennett, Goetz Ottmann

Objectives

• To identify emerging critical issues facing social work and re-articulate alternative futures grounded in social justice, solidarity, and care that can confront the challenges associated with digital automation, displacement, and social unrest, alongside epistemological and environmental challenges of the coming decades.
• To explore how new and false regimes of truth, algorithmic governance, and forms of surveillance shape illusions of understanding, social inclusion, belonging, and equality, alongside simulacra of democratic life.
• To investigates how rapid technological, socio-political, economic, cultural, and environmental change destabilises communities worldwide leading to displacement, conflict, violence and the erosion of community, security, and 20th century frameworks of legal order and justice.
• To interrogate emergent modalities of resistance and the re‑imagining of social justice and equality, and to analyse how individuals, families, communities mobilise collective, counter‑colonial strategies in response to intensifying forms of extraction, dispossession, and exploitation.
• To re‑envision social work’s ethical, political, and practical responses and ways forward in a politically, socially, culturally and economically rapidly changing world.

Brief context

Over the past four decades, social work has found itself operating within a context of intensifying crises—ecological, political, economic, epistemic, and technological. The pressures associated with these crises have not only reshaped the contexts in which individuals, families, and communities live and struggle to survive but have also disrupted the very foundations of social work knowledge, ethics, and practice.

As the challenges intensify, the profession faces how to respond, how to find new ways to take on the challenges currently facing its future, and crucially how the profession can assist in building social and political structures and institutions that are grounded in participatory, democratic processes and principles of social justice and real social change.

In this proposed Handbook of Contemporary Issues in Social Work: Critical Social Work in a Fragmenting World we plan to bring together leading scholars whose work examines critical social work practice and education in an rapidly automated, individualistic, and politically fragmented world whose ecological limitations emerge ever more sharply.

We plan for this handbook to be forward-looking. We plan for contributions that will consider how individuals, families, and communities, organisations and institutions flourish amid uncertainty and explore and promote creative ways forward.

Organisation of the proposed book

At this early stage we envision each section to contain at least six key chapters with focus on creative and forward thinking analysis and practice.

 Draft section/topic include

1. Rise of the Digital Economy and its impact on the social
2. Displacement
3. Power, social unrest, violence, safety, and peace
4. Challenges to epistemologies, ontologies, ethical and legal frameworks
5. The changing and challenging work of social work practice
6. Decolonised social work, indigenous sovereignty, Eurocentric oppressions, emancipatory alternatives from the Global South
7. Challenges facing critically informed narratives (e.g. feminism, pro-feminism, post-humanism, decolonialism, environmentalism, transhumanism, ableism, universalism, humanism, masculinism)
8. The future of critical social work

Timeline

Abstracts submitted by 24^th April 2026 (150-200 words max) plus100 word bio.

Acceptance: 15^th May 2026

Proposal submitted to Routledge: 30^st June 2026

Send abstracts to Carolyn.noble@acap.edu.au  and dbaines@mail.ubc.ca