In recent years, social justice has moved to become a central principle and value
within social work. As social work educators, we found that many of our conversations
with students and our colleagues centred on understanding, explaining
and debating different approaches to addressing the many forms of injustice that
require attention. We also found this area to be a slippery and difficult terrain to
cover with students as it is replete with competing approaches, different conceptions
of social justice and different levels of analysis. For example, the view of social
justice changes with the level of resolution, depending on whether we are conceptualising
justice at the level of individuals or groups and communities. This
changes the kinds of questions we can ask about what should be done and why?
To address some of these issues, we turned to the literature to try and bring
clarity to our discussions about social justice. We figured that others have experienced
similar issues in grappling with the complexity of addressing social justice
and engaging students in thinking and acting about it. In doing so, we could see
there was an opportunity to initiate a dialogue between social work understandings
of social justice—built from long engagement with people experiencing poverty,
disadvantage, injustice, oppression, stigma and discrimination—and the critical and
philosophical literature concerned with developing concepts and principles of social
justice. We found that the philosophical literature can offer significant clarity in
terms of tracing concepts such as freedom, democracy, theories of distribution and
justice, and that critical theories offer a corpus of resources to theorise the way
social structures perpetuate oppression, discrimination and stigma. We also found
that many of these theoretical ideas have been tested and given significant
expression in social work practices. Hence, we have used a mix of influential classic
literature, as well as more contemporary sources.