Return of the posthuman: Developing Indigenist perspectives for social work at a time of environmental crisis

Abstract

This chapter explores what it means for humans to relate responsibly to non-humans - including inanimate beings - within contexts of environmental crisis. This is with a view to reconsidering the injunction for social workers to ‘promote … the empowerment and liberation of people’ (IFSW/IASSW 2014:1). We achieve this purpose by bringing Indigenous Australian ways of being, knowing, relating and doing things into conversation with critical posthumanist and post-antropocentric theorising. Outside of mainstream social work, this process of engagement has begun already (see for example, Bignall, Hemming & Rigney 2016) and to this, we add a social work perspective. Our approach is one of looking to, or seeking contributions from, indigenous ways of being in the world. Instead, we aspire to a decolonial mode of engaging (Mignolo 2011) so as to contribute - in the social work sphere - to a disruption of the kinds of power relations that have been established via the project of colonisation and continue to operate in contemporary times. We begin by presenting a case study of two recent socio-environmental crises in Australia, namely the Adani mining proposal and the series of catastrophic fish kills in the Murray-Darling River. In a second step, we provide an overview of how these crises have been received and responded to by First nations peoples and interpret these within an indigenist frame of reference. We then present points of connection between these responses and post-antropocentric, critical posthumanist thought, as exemplified by Braidotti (2013, 2018) and Haraway (2016). We argue that some of their central concepts are familiar to, and correspond well with, Indigenous Australian ways of being, knowing, relating and doing things. Finally, we consider in what ways such an indigenist critique might challenge, disrupt, enlarge, or point to alternatives to, the dominant humanist, anthropocentric status quo, as supported by key writers in the field of anti-oppressive social work for communities experiencing subjugation, domination, and environmental crises (Baines, 2011; Dominelli 2002, 2012; Mullaly 2010). We conclude with a sense of practical guidance on how this might play out in a broader socio-cultural and political landscape in which established power structures and epistemological binaries present significant challenges.