How do you compose out of darkness a song of light?
Quote from Kei Miller, Poet
Tonight I stumbled on this beautiful quote from a podcast on the Scottish Poetry Library website. It made me think about the purpose of social work and how dark and heavy these strange times can feel at the moment.
This is the first blog for our new Social Work Departmental blogspot. Our plan is to use this space to grapple with the dark and spread light. As a department we have been thinking about doing this for a long time. The recent COVID-19 crisis has focused our minds and we have been asking ourselves, how can we reach out and create community in these times of social distancing?
Writing more often, in different formats to reach a range of communities of interest seemed one important way to do this. Blogs are short pieces of writing which are freely available to anyone with the time to read them. We will be writing blogs about lots of different things. Blogs may highlight:
- new projects or research publications
- innovations or reflections on learning and teaching for social work students and practice educators
- work in progress
- insights for practice from our discussions with students and practitioners
- theoretical developments
Blogs will be written by staff and students from across the department. We also hope to feature blogs from our friends and collaborators in practice, including practitioners and those with lived experience. We will invite researchers from other disciplines to write about their own research and how it might be of use for social workers.
We hope to start some conversations about the things that matter most to us as a group of social work academics, questions like:
- What is social work for?
- How do we change the larger social structures that continue to replicate conditions of inequality and adversity, whilst also meeting the needs of individuals?
- How do we best nurture hopeful and creative social work practice and research?
We hope you will read our blogs, contribute to conversations and perhaps write a blog yourself.
We would love to hear from you.
Dr Autumn Roesch-Marsh, Senior Lecturer in Social Work
You can follow us on Twitter @SocialWorkEdinU
