Welfare Words: Critical Social Work & Social Policy - Paperback

by Paul Michael Garrett (Author)

'Systematically exposes the neoliberal myths in unequal societies' - Niels Rosendal Jensen
′A call to arms to challenge inequality and social exclusion.′ - Lel Meleyal
'An impassioned dissection of the highly coded lexicon of so-called welfare reform...get reading, get angry, get ready'. - Gargi Bhattacharyya

Welfare Words analyses the keywords and phrases commonly used by policy-makers, news-outlets and wider society, when referring to social policy, welfare reform and social work in the present-day culture of neoliberal capitalism. Examining how power relations operate through language and culture, it encourages readers to question how welfare words fit within a wider economic and cultural context riven with gross social inequalities; to disrupt taken-for-granted meanings within mainstream social work and social policy, and to think more deeply, critically and politically about the incessant usage of specific words and phrases. Written by an authoritative voice in the field, Paul Michael Garrett makes sense of complex theories which codify everyday experience, giving readers vital tools to better understand and change their social worlds.

Author Biography

Paul Garrett is the respected author of Remaking Social Work with Children and Families (Routledge, 2003); Social Work with Irish Children and Families in Britain (Policy Press, 2004); ′Transforming′ Children's Services? (Open University/McGraw Hill, 2009); Social Work and Social Theory (Policy Press, 2013, but with a Chinese edition presently being negotiated); Critical and Radical Debates in Social Work: Children and Families (Policy Press, 2014). His work has appeared in international peer reviewed journals across a range of disciplines; approximately 100 hundred articles have been published since 1998.

He have presented papers at a number of international conferences. His next invited 'keynote' is schedule for the international Sociology and Social Work conference in 2015. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Critical Social Policy (SAGE) (where he edits the Reviews section), the European Journal of Social Work (Taylor & Francis) and he is also a Journal of Progressive Human Services (Taylor & Francis)consulting editor for the US-based .