The relevance of Nancy Fraser for transformative social work education

Abstract

This chapter examines the relevance and implications of Nancy Fraser’s scholarship (1989–2018) for a transformative social work pedagogy. It presents a range of concepts she has used to explain the crises of injustice in contemporary capitalist societies, as well as available responses. These include needs interpretation, dependency and gender justice; participatory parity and the economic, political and cultural dimensions of justice; abnormal justice and transformative practices. The chapter provides an example of transformative social work education, in which Fraser’s theory of justice enabled students to articulate multiple experiences of injustice and to explore different ways of resisting them. It argues that Fraser’s scholarship provides social workers with an apt language with which to critique the profession’s role in perpetuating injustice by, inter alia, aligning itself with expert discourses, demonstrating a readiness to embrace reprivatisation and a longstanding discomfort to engage with oppositional discourses on the needs of service-users. Fraser’s attention to the injustices of maldistribution, misrecognition, misrepresentation, misframing and reprivatisation on the one hand and her notions of participatory parity and transformative practices on the other, can support students in deliberating on how social work might contribute to advancing justice in a deep, transformative way.