This ground-breaking new work provides a detailed and extensive comparison of how the physical environment has been conceptualized in social work and other professions, and offers a new and attractive foundational metaphor for social work. The author acknowledges the need for greater awareness and action regarding environmental impacts and the book promotes more comprehensive notions of responsibility, identity, and stewardship that lead to a dynamic metaphor of people as place as the foundation for relevant social work practice in the early 21st century.
Why is that a profession with a declared focus on “person-in-environment” has been so silent on the environmental crisis?
Mainstream social work theory has narrowed the understanding of environment to include merely the social environment, but this approach is no longer sufficient for participation in multi-disciplinary efforts to tackle urgent environmental issues.
Transformative notions of responsibility, identity, and stewardship have been developed on the fringes of our professional community: rural/remote social workers, Aboriginal social workers, and international and spiritual social workers. They must now move to the core of the profession.
Introduction: The Environment, Social Work, and Ecological Thinking The Environmental Imperative and Social Work
Author and Voice
Organization of the Book
Thinking Ecologically
Chapter One: Smoke and Mirrors: How the Environment Became the Social Environment The Effect: Personal Observations of the Vanished Environment
Beginnings: Lighting the Match
The 1980s and 1990s: Still Smokin’
The 2000s: Illusion Reaffirmed
Variations on the Illusion
Chapter Two: False Starts and Sputterings: Partial Efforts to Include the Physical Environment The Physical Environment as Window Dressing
The Physical Environment Limited to Agency or Client Environs
Diagrams and the Disappearing Physical Environment
Assessment and the Absent Physical Environment
Case Studies: Physical Environment as a Rurual Consideration
Environmentalist or Social Worker?
Chapter Three: Clearing Space in the Conceptual Brambles: Incorporating the Physical Environment Beginnings
Mid-1990s Forum
Environment as Central
Place and Space in Social Work
Chapter Four: Rural/Remote Social Work: Environmental Context and Place Rurality and Rural Social Work
Divergent Paths for Rural Social Work
A Personal Example from the Northern Canadian Context
Remote Practice
A Sense of Place
Chapter Five: Environment as Sacred: Spirituality, Deep Ecology, and Aboriginal Perspectives Spirituality and Social Work
Spirituality and the Environment: Smoke and Mirrors Again?
Spiritual Interventions and the Environment
Deep Ecology
Aboriginal Social Work: Traditional Knowledge, the Land, and Identity
Chapter Six: International Social Work: Environment, Devleopment, and Sustainability International Social Work and Global Environmental Citizenship
Development and the Environment
International Voices for Sustainable Development
International Social Work Organizations: Glimpses of the Environment
Chapter Seven: Perspectives from Other Disciplines: The Environment and a Sense of Place Painting: Encounters with Landscape
Film: Telling a Place
Music: Soundscapes and Expressions of Locality
Viticulture: Terroir and Place Value
Sociology: Habitus and Embodied Sense of Place
Psychology: Environments, Place, and Behaviour
Environmental Design: Placemaking and Positive Space
Geography: Earthkeeping and Places that Matter
Education: Wayfinding and Living Well in Place
Summary: Place, Sustainability, and Multidisciplinary Efforts
Chapter Eight: Language and Disfluency: Expressing the Environment in Social Work Visual Cues: Punctuation and Capitalization
Language and Limitations
Prepositions and Propositions
Disfluency and Environmental Discourse
Chapter Nine: People as Place Reclaiming the Environment: Recognizing Place and Stewardship
Models and Metaphors: Retiring “Person-in-Environment”
Social Purpose: Living Well in Place
Implications
References
Biography
Michael Kim Zapf is a Professor Emeritus of Social Work with the University of Calgary. Building on his early practice years in the Yukon Territory and three decades in academia, his research and writing have focused on social work practice and education in rural, remote, and Aboriginal communities.
“This book is a must read for all social workers. It challenges us to rethink our traditional ‘person-in-environment’ practice framework. It highlights the criticality of engaging with contemporary environmental destruction and its multiple effects on people and other species, on our place and our world.”
Bob Lonne, School of Social Work and Human Services, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; National President, Australian Association of Social Workers
“This is a paradigm-breaking book that overturns a foundational metaphor and confronts the boundaries of dualistic thinking, thereby enabling social work to engage in the significant social/environmental issues facing the planet today. Building from Zapf’s rethinking of the important of ‘place’ in social work theory and practice, the profession can break from the constraints of tradition and finally move forward to respond effectively to the pressing issues of environmental destruction, sustainability, and spirituality.”
John Coates, Department of Social Work, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
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