(Re)claiming human rights: a critical realist exploration of rights-based social work

Ondertitel:a critical realist exploration of rights-based social work

Korte inhoud:As a practice-based profession and academic discipline, social work is informed by and committed to human rights. Throughout the past few decades, the debate on the relationship between social work and human rights has predominantly been held on a theoretical level. In recent years, increasing efforts have been made to redress this imbalance by investigating and conceptualising how human rights are enacted and translated into practice. These contributions have elicited how rights-based practice is informed by human rights principles, is demarcated in terms of goals, methods and perspectives, constructs the meaning of human rights from the bottom up, and takes form in particular ways. This dissertation addresses two pertinent gaps in this evolving body of knowledge. First, it seeks to strengthen the explanatory base of rights-based practice, enriching earlier descriptive contributions by adopting critical realism as a philosophy of science. This perspective emphasises the causal forces, mechanisms, and contingencies that explain how change arises from the interplay between people and society. Second, tendencies of methodological and professional nationalism are countered by also evaluating rights-based practice beyond the conceptual boundaries of the nation-state and citizenship. Throughout this manuscript, a combination of empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions will explore how, why, and under what circumstances rights-based practice contributes to emancipatory change. This question will be investigated and contrasted in two distinct empirical settings: statutory practices oriented at overcoming the non-realisation of citizens’ social rights and humanitarian work with undocumented migrants for whom the ‘right to have rights’ is not axiomatic. As these studies reveal, those contexts instil diverging approaches to social work and bring change in the lives of people through the activation of markedly different mechanisms. In essence, it is shown how rights-based practice is not only about claiming human rights, but often also about reclaiming the very humanity they are based upon. Building on these experiences, a meta-theoretical framework is developed to explain how human rights can guide social workers towards change with and for people on the margins of society. On an overarching level, this dissertation challenges predominant dichotomies in the literature on rights-based social work – between deductive and inductive approaches – and advances a more dialectical understanding.

Jaar van publicatie:2024

Trefwoorden:Sociology

Toegankelijkheid:Open