This chapter describes why and how the author decided to leave his social work teaching position at an Australian university and start a cooperative that could more appropriately respond to the changing social and ecological context and could be more commensurate with the true values of the social work profession. The chapter moves from the author's experiences and philosophical motivations guiding his decision to move from the university context to the establishment of a social and ecological change cooperative and the invitation to colleagues and students to join the re-contextualizing experiment to the reasons why the cooperative format was chosen. The programs, projects, and partnerships, which have been realized in the course of the 23 years since the start of the Borderlands Cooperative, are documented and reflected upon, leading to final recommendations for a social work practice that remains true to its historical mission whilst responding to the contemporary contextual challenges.
TopIntroduction
The past 50 years of evolving feminist and other critical praxis taught us that the “personal is political” (https://anzswjournal.nz/anzsw/article/view/478), were both blacklisted when they tried to profess it and were periodically shunned by the profession itself. During the late 1960s and 70s, when Radical Social Work (Brake & Bailey, 1980) appeared to become an accepted discursive figure, at least in academic discourses, it turned out to remain an “all-too-brief revolution in Social Work education, research and practice…” as i1 argued in an earlier contribution (Boulet, 2018).
Indeed, during the conservative regression of the 1980s–90s, “the changes that have occurred…within the framework of neoliberalism…have impacted on social work in negative ways… [its potential] constrained…or nullified in the individualistic, free market world we currently inhabit” (Rogowski, 2020, p. 22). Social work, both in practice and in education, turned its professional focus away from the complementary contextual vision of its legacy, to a narrow “person-centred” one (Noble et al., 2018), therewith largely forsaking its social/societal change perspective and the associated theoretical, policy and intervention modalities it had honed, in the course of the preceding century.
As the new millennium gained speed, it gradually became clear that the promised trickle-down effects from the supply-side neo-liberal policies and impositions were not going to happen. Still, politicians and their econometric wisecracks continued to justify their balanced budget and scarcity arguments and rejected distributional approaches to collectively produced wealth as examples of bankrupt socialism. British PM Thatcher’s infamous “There Is No Alternative” (or ‘TINA’) to the neoliberal doctrine—resonating across the world, enforced by World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization global mechanisms—continues to represent the contemporary version of what Piketty’s Capital and Ideology (2020) identifies as the necessity for “[e]very human society [to] justify its inequalities”.
It is worthwhile to fully quote the introductory paragraph of Piketty’s book:
Every human society must justify its inequalities: unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse. Every epoch therefore develops a range of contradictory discourses and ideologies for the purpose of legitimizing the inequality that already exists or that people believe should exist. From these discourses emerge certain economic, social, and political rules, which people then use to make sense of the ambient social structure. Out of the clash of contradictory discourses – a clash that is at once economic, social, and political – comes a dominant narrative or narratives, which bolster the existing inequality regime. (Piketty, 2020, p.1)
In such seemingly ubiquitous context, social work is called to help bolster the inequality regimes by softening the consequences for those at their suffering bottom—mediated by institutions delivering health, welfare, education, correctional and care services (Boulet & Oelschlägel, 1976). Applying this logic to the effects of neoliberalism on social work (as adopted through “spending-cuts” required by the “austerity” policies of conservative and “third way” social-democratic parties and governments), Rogowski (2020, p.88) suggests: