This chapter provides an overview of some of the key practice strategies that social workers use to try to challenge and arrest the massive social inequalities we explored in the previous chapters. The theory and practices of critical social work help us to devise creative and effective ways to contest and resist the harms created by oppressive social forces. Developing our capacity for critical analysis is an important first step that underpins all other practices outlined in this chapter: social policy analysis and development; social activism, allyship and participation in social movements; critical practice in organisations; and undertaking social research. These practices connect practitioners with discretionary spaces in which they can work towards social justice and emancipatory aims.

As noted in Chapter 1, since writing the last edition of this text in 2019, the world has undergone rapid changes and continues to transform at an accelerated pace. Social work, often informed by social movements and community experience, aims to anticipate and respond to emerging social issues. Perhaps this is one of the defining hallmarks of the social work profession – its capacity to evolve to address new challenges and opportunities. Throughout this book, and especially in Chapter 2, we explore some of the global social forces and discourses that characterise the rapidly changing contexts in which social work operates. These changes have created new challenges that require critical responses, in some cases generating new fields of practice. In this chapter, our major focus will be on: (1) the increasing urgency of climate change, threats to the planet (and humanity) and the implications of climate change for social work; (2) global pandemics and their impacts for people and service delivery; and (3) increasing wealth inequality and associated poverty and homelessness.