Working social assemblages: Towards a new geography of social work

AbstractThis paper explores possibilities for extending the geographical imagination in academic studies of social work. It notes how current “geographical” research is extensive and diverse—including interests in social and natural environments, practice settings, and global issues—but argues for a change whereby it is more explicitly informed by, and cast as, human geography. Part of this change would involve a transition in basic enterprise, whereby researching social work geographically shifts from being a one‐way effort on the part of academic social workers, to being a two‐way project also involving geographers. Another part would be an important theoretical transition whereby a broadly posthumanist geographical imagination is developed. Moving beyond humanistic privileging of a sovereign subject, this might emphasise distributed agency and a range of more‐than‐human actors, processes, and forces. Specifically, with this theoretical transition in mind, adopting a recently developed posthumanist theoretical typology, attention is paid to how research might be framed around three spatial processes always at play in the emergence and expression of social work. For each of these processes, resonance is acknowledged in existing social work literature, and final consideration is given to quite specific questions that could be asked and expertise that could be tapped.