The Body Politics of Glocal Social Work

This book shapes a situated body politics to re-think, re-write, and de-colonise social work as a post-anthropocentric discipline headed towards glocalisation, where human and non-human embodiments and agencies are entangled in glocal environmental worlds.
It critically and creatively examines how social work can be theorised, practised, and written in renewed ways through dialogical and transdisciplinary practices. This book is composed of eight essayistic spaces, envisioning social work through embodied, glocal, and earthly entanglements. By drawing on research-based knowledge, autobiographical notes, stories, poetry, photographs, and an art exhibition in social work education, these essays provide readers with analysis and strategies that are useful for research, education, and practice as well as life-long learning.
The book constitutes key literature for researchers, educators, practitioners, and activists in social work, sociology, architecture, art and creative writing, feminist and postcolonial studies, human geography, and post-anthropocentric philosophy. It offers the readers sustainable ways to re-think and re-write social work towards a glocal- and post-anthropocentric more-than-human worldview.

Mona B. Livholts is Professor of Social Work in the Department of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland; Secretary and Executive Board Member in The European Association of Social Work, EASSW; Founder of the Network for Reflexive Academic Writing Methodologies, RAW (2008-2017). Livholts works with glocal-, post-anthropocentric, feminist- and postcolonial power analysis for social and environmental justice in the intersection of social work, creative writing, and art-based research. She has invented new forms for creative life writing, such as the thinkingwriting subject, post/academic writing, and the untimely academic novella by uses of literary fiction, memory work, diaries, letters, poetry, and photography. Research themes include media narratives on rape, sexual harassment, gender, space and memory, monuments and narrative inequality, environmental exhaustion, and the body politics of social work. Livholts has published monographs, and co-edited and edited volumes in Swedish and English, including Social Work in a Glocalised World (with Bryant 2017), Situated Writing as Theory and Method. The Untimely Academic Novella (2019), and The Body Politics of Glocal Social Work. Essays in the Post-Anthropocentric Condition (2022).

Introduction A Book of Eight Essayistic Spaces: Glocal Embodiment in the Post-Anthropocene An Invitation to Diffractive and Slow Reading 1. Re-Wor(l)dling Social Work: This Essay is offered as an Invitation to Post-Anthropocentric Thinking, Practice, and Writing 2. Mapping the Glocal: This Essay is Offered as a Triptych Paradigm 3. Exhibiting the Glocal: This Essay is Offered as an Eco-Social Sculpture 4. Exhausting the Glocal: This Essay is Offered as a Drifting Mo(ve)ment 5. Decolonising the Glocal: This essay is Offered as a Diffractive Practice 6. Spatialising the Glocal: This essay is Offered as a Counter-Monument 7. Writing the Glocal: This Essay is Offered as a Space for Post-Anthropocentric Writers 8. Glocality and Body Politics: This Essay is Offered as a Vision and Practice for Slow Science in Social Work