This multidisciplinary book brings together a series of critical engagements regarding the notion of ethical practice. As a whole, the book explores the question of how the current neo-liberal, socio-political moment and its relationship to the historical legacies of colonialism, white settlement, and racism inform and shape our practices, pedagogies, and understanding of encounters in diverse settings. The contributors draw largely on the work of Sara Ahmed's Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, each chapter taking up a particular encounter and unravelling the elements that created that meeting in its specific time and space. Sites of encounters included in this volume range from the classroom to social work practice and from literary to media interactions, both within Canada and internationally. Paramount to the discussions is a consideration of how relations of power and legacies of oppression shape the self and others, and draw boundaries between bodies within an encounter. From a social justice perspective, Unravelling Encounters exposes the political conditions that configure our meetings with one another and inquires into what it means to care, to respond, and to imagine oneself as an ethical subject.

Setting up cultural encounters is a widespread intervention strategy employed to diffuse conflicts and manage difficulties related to diversity. These organised cultural encounters bring together people of different backgrounds in order to promote peaceful coexistence and inclusion. These transformative aims relate to the participants but are often also expected to spill over into the society, community or context addressed by the encounter. As a category, ‘Organised Cultural Encounters’ draws together a variety of activities and events such as multicultural festivals, dialogue initiatives, diversity training and inclusion projects – activities that are generally not considered to be of the same kind. Most of the existing literature on these types of encounters is instrumental and has an overall emphasis on evaluations in terms of outcome or success rate. This book goes beyond evaluations, and the contributors pose and debate theoretical and methodological questions and analyse the practices and performativities of particular encounters. Taken together, it makes an important contribution to the theorisation and analysis of intercultural relations and negotiations. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people. In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.

The underlying premise of this book is that reading is touching. Words leap out of their beds and pierce flesh like a knife. Storytelling breathes within the dynamic of encounters with air, fire, earth and water, permeated by emotion, imagination and touch. These ideas are contextualized within ancient community rituals, social justice gatherings, pedagogical practices, and map-making. The four elements are retrieved from exile as imaginative, corporeal, and generative substances that operate within stories like medicine bundles. Reading becomes a Deleuzian ‘enterprise of health’, a challenging experience that grasps Paulo Freire’s generative themes, and is simultaneously thought-provoking and valuable. The capacious literary space capable of housing this sensual ferment is the novel. More verb than noun, the novel is an elemental bundle that engages with flesh in all its manifestations. This book spotlights Irish novels by John Banville and Mary Morrissy, exploring how they revitalise the elements with sensual, social, and tactile textures.

Contemporary Vulnerabilities offers critical reflections about vulnerable moments in research committed to social change. This interdisciplinary collection gathers reflexive narratives and analyses about innovative methodologies that engage with unconventional and unexpected research spaces inhabited and shared by scholars. The authors encourage us to collaborate within, reflect on, and confront the frictions of inquiry around social change. With an aim of contesting the dominance of Eurocentric epistemologies, the collection includes modes of storytelling and examples of knowledge gathering that are often excluded from academic texts in general and methodological texts in particular. All those interested in research methodologies and social justice inquiry will find provocation and recognition in this volume, including scholars, ethics boards, and students. Contributors: Aly Bailey, Kayla Besse, Meredith Bessey, Madeline Burghardt, Claire Carter, Shraddha Chatterjee, Yuriko Cowper-Smith, Eva Cupchik, Cheyanne Desnomie, Bongi Dube, Athanasia Francis, Rebecca Godderis, Moses Gordon, Emily Grafton, Caitlin Janzen, Evadne Kelly, Debra Langan, Rebecca Lennox, Corinne L. Mason, Tara-Leigh McHugh, Preeti Nayak, Anh Ngo, Jess Notwell, Marcia Oliver, Cassandra J. Opikokew Wajuntah, Merrick Pilling, Kendra-Ann Pitt, Salima Punjani, seeley quest, Carla Rice, Jen Rinaldi, Lori Ross, Kate Rossiter, Brenda Rossow-Kimball, Siobhán Saravanamuttu, Melissa Schnarr, Bettina Schneider, Irene Shankar, Skylar Sookpaiboon, Chelsea Temple Jones, Amelia Thorpe, Paul Tshuma, Amber-Lee Varadi, Jijian Voronka, Kristyn White.

Paul Nonnekes pursues debates in psychoanalysis and cultural studies to arrive at a distinctive conception of a Canadian masculinity. In close discussions of novels by Rudy Wiebe and Robert Kroetsch, Nonnekes ranges from Hegel to Lacan to Zizek, eliciting an evolving conception of love characteristic of the Canadian cultural imagination.

This concise study argues there is a qualitative difference between Arabic literature, Arabic literature translated into English, and a literature conceived and executed in English by writers of an Arab background. It examines the corpus of a group of contemporary Arab writers who incorporate Arab subjects and themes into the English language.

Inclusive campus-community collaborations provide critical opportunities to build community capacity—defined as a community's ability to jointly respond to challenges and opportunities—and sustainability. Through case studies from across all three subregions of Appalachia from Georgia to Pennsylvania, Engaging Appalachia: A Guidebook for Building Capacity and Sustainability offers diverse perspectives and guidance for promoting social change through campus-community relationships from faculty, community members, and student contributors. This volume explores strategies for creating more inclusive and sustainable partnerships through the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. In representing diverse areas, environments, and issues, three relatable themes emerge within a practice viewpoint that is scalable to communities beyond Appalachia: fostering student leadership, asset-building, and needs fulfillment within community engagement. Engaging Appalachia presents collaborative approaches to regional community engagement and offers important lessons in place-based methods for achieving sustainable and just development. Written with practicality in mind, this guidebook embraces hard-earned experiences from decades of work in Appalachia and sets forth new models for building community resilience in a changing world.

What we think must inform what we do, argue the editors and authors of this cutting-edge social work textbook. In this innovative, expansive and wide-ranging collection, leading social work thinkers engage with social work traditions to bridge social work theory and practice and arrive at social work praxis: a uniting of critical thought and ethical action. Critical Social Work Praxis is organized into sixteen sections, each reflecting a critical social work tradition or approach. Each section has a theory chapter, which succinctly outlines the tradition’s main concepts or tenets, a praxis chapter, which shows how the theory informs social work practice, and a commentary chapter, which provides a critical analysis of the tensions and difficulties of the approach. The text helps students understand how to extend theory into praxis and gives instructors critical new tools and discussion ideas. This book is the result of decades of experience teaching social work theory and praxis and is a comprehensive teaching and learning tool for the critical social work classroom.

The Routledge Handbook of International Critical Social Work is a companion volume to the Routledge Handbook of Critical Social Work. It brings together world-leading scholars in the field to provide additional, in-depth and provocative consideration of alternative and progressive ways of thinking about social work. Critical social work is increasingly involved in a global conversation, and as a subfield of social work it is rapidly becoming an interdisciplinary field in its own right and promoting novel forms of political activism. The Handbook showcases the global influences and path-breaking ideas of critical social work and examines the different stances taken on important political and ethical issues. It provides the first complete survey of the vibrant field of critical social work in a rich international context. This definitive volume is one of the most comprehensive source books on crucial social work that is available on the international stage and an essential guide for anyone interested in the politics of social work. The Handbook is divided into sever sections • Thinking the Political • Politics and the Ruins of Neoliberalism • Negotiating the State: Resistance, Protest and Dissent • Race, Bordering Practices and Migrants • Post Colonialism, Subaltern and the Global South • Critical Feminism, Sexuality and Gender Politics • Posthumanism, Pandemics and Environment The Handbook is comprised of 46 newly written chapters (and one reprint) which concentrate on differences between European and American contributions in this field as well as explicitly identifying the significance of critical social work in the context of Latin America. It provides a further vital trajectory of intellectual practice theory via interdisciplinary discussion of areas such as biopolitics, critical race theory, boundaries of gender and sexuality, queer studies, new conceptions of community, issues of public engagement, racism and Roma people, ecological feminism, environmental humanities and critical animal studies. The Handbook is an innovative and authoritative guide to theory and method as they relate to policy issues and practice and focus on the primary debates of today in social work from a critical perspective, and will be required reading for all students, academics and practitioners of social work and related professions.