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BJSW Advance Access originally published online on December 5, 2006
British Journal of Social Work 2008 38(3):561-579; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcl367
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved.

Liquid Social Work: Welfare Interventions as Mobile Practices

Harry Ferguson

Harry Ferguson is Professor of Social Work at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His books include Protecting Children in Time: Child Abuse, Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity (Palgrave, 2004) and (with Karen Jones and Barry Cooper) Best Practice in Social Work: Critical Perspectives (Palgrave, 2007).

Correspondence to Professor Harry Ferguson, University of the West of England, Faculty of Health and Social Care, Blackberry Hill, Bristol, BS16 1DD, UK. E-mail: Harry.ferguson{at}uwe.ac.uk


  Abstract

This paper re-examines the nature of social work from the perspective of movement and ‘mobilities’. It shows that social work is at all times ‘on the move’, yet theory and analyses of policy and practice largely depict it as static, solid and sedentarist. The paper draws on the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006), through which a concern with flows and movements of people, objects, information, practices, speed and rhythm, with complexity, fluid images and liquid metaphors, is moving to the centre of social theory. An understanding of the ‘liquid’, mobile character of social work means producing accounts which are much closer to what its practices are, how and where they are performed and experienced by service users and professionals, and the opportunities and risks inherent to them. Three key domains of practice—the home visit, the car journey and the office/organization—are examined in terms of the movements that go on in them. Viewed through systemic and complexity theories, it is shown that social work interventions in late-modernity are best understood in terms of a flow of mobile practices between public and private worlds, organizations and the home, at the heart of which is the sensual body of the practitioner on the move.

Keywords: mobilities, movement, social work, cars, home visit, information technology and welfare organizations


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