What comes after the subject? Towards a critical posthumanist social work

Abstract

This chapter asks: what does it mean to think beyond the human in social work? Is it possible to craft a mode of intervention and ethics that rejects mainstream social work preoccupations with the human and the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Can the privileged place designated to the human, with its related artefacts of rationality and purpose, be overcome? What would social work look like if the concentration on the human was displaced? These questions lead us to ask if a new kind of posthumanist thinking will enable a redefinition of the place of the human in the world of social work by introducing both the technological and the biological or ‘green’ continuum in which the ‘human’ is but one life form among many? In overturning the centrality of the human in social work, would such a move permit a new ethics that is derived from a vibrant connectedness with living ecology, materiality and the place we occupy within it?

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