Paul Michael Garrett, Dissenting Social Work. Critical Theory, Resistance and Pandemic, Routledge, 2021
Book Description
This book, from one of international social work’s leading radical educators, provides a richly compelling argument for the profession to become more critical and dissenting.
Addressing the troubled times in which we find ourselves, Garrett’s book examines a broad range of theoretical frameworks and draws on diverse writers, such as Marx, Foucault, Brown, Zuboff, Rancière, Wacquant, Arendt, Levinas, Fanon and Gramsci. The author’s panoramic vision encompasses Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Algeria, Israel/Palestine and China. Timely, lively and accessible, this book speaks directly to some of the main preoccupations of our era. Readers will be encouraged to relate developments in social work to key themes circulating around migration, the threat of neo-fascism, surveillance culture, colonialism, the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic. Imbued with a sense of hope for a brighter future, this book encourages a new generation of social work students to recognise and examine the importance of critical theory for understanding the structural forces shaping their lives and the lives of those with whom they work and provide services.
This book is vital, indispensable and essential reading for social work students and other readers, throughout the world, seeking to make the connection between social work, social theory and sociology.
Table of Contents
Preface and acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Questioning the world of ‘appearances’: Karl Marx
Chapter 3. Neoliberalism, human capital and biopolitics: Michel Foucault and Wendy Brown
Chapter 4. Surveillance capitalism: Shoshana Zuboff
Chapter 5. Equality NOW: Jacques Rancière
Chapter 6. Critical Scholarship and neoliberal penality: Loïc Wacquant
Chapter 7. Dissenting with the arch-contrarian: Hannah Arendt
Chapter 8. Remembering that African, Asian and Palestinian lives matter: Emmanuel Levinas
Chapter 9. It is becoming ‘impossible to breathe’: Frantz Fanon
Chapter 10. Social work’s Chinese future?: Antonio Gramsci
Chapter 11. Conclusion
Foucault News 
any student who is convinced by this book (and the like) will be effectively ruined for actual/institutional social work and doomed to a kind of deep and torturous alienation from their work and coworkers if they continue on to practice…
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