Social Worker Identity: Are we submissive or subversive? | BASW England West Yorkshire Branch Event

Join students and social workers from across West Yorkshire for this exciting online event designed to enable you to build connections, explore your professional identify and to inform and educate supporting your continuous learning and development.

Social worker Identity: Are we submissive or subversive?

Speaker: Dr Joe Hanley, The Open University

Social Work England increasing their annual fee. Artificial intelligence promising to revolutionise practice. Yet more frameworks and standards we need to evidence. At times it can feel like social workers are passive recipients of the policies and reforms that shape their practice.

This session aims to interrogate that belief and look at social worker identity as both submissive and subversive. The powerlessness social workers often feel will be contrasted with examples, and data, around how social workers regularly do resist, and how we could do more to challenge the developments that impact on the profession and those we support. Many of the policies and initiatives levied on social workers are actually a reaction to this resistance, and a tacit recognition from policymakers that social workers have a lot more power than they want us to know.

The purpose of this session is to generate reflection and discussion around these and other related issues.

Joe Hanley is a lecturer in social work at The Open University. His research and writing focuses on contemporary social work policy developments and the networks that shape these.

This branch event is open to BASW members and non-members, students, social workers and retired social workers living, working or studying in the West Yorkshire area.

In addition, you will have the opportunity to: • Find out about what BASW membership can do for you. • Enhance your learning, development and professional identity. • Be part of a Social Work movement in your local area.

Come along to find out more!