Poverty and Inequality

Two points to be clear on from the get-go of this review. First, I want to state my unreserved support for ‘Critical and Radical Debates in Social Work’, of which ‘Poverty and Inequality’ is a part, as a very timely and innovative publishing project. Second, my review is unapologetically situated in a particular professional and political experience and it is from that vantage point I find myself, on balance, disappointed with this set of papers. An opportunity to place the dialectics of class struggle at the centre of an analysis of social work is only partially realised—but it is still a contribution to be welcomed. TINA (there is no alternative) is the strategic core of the neo-liberalism that intellectually fuels contemporary advanced capitalism—imperialism to fully name it. Resistance requires the creation and furnishing of intellectual spaces in which the exploration and the forging of alternative understandings can occur. With this new publishing project, Iain Ferguson and Michael Lavalette have added to the space available to social work for this urgent task. They have selected six core areas of contemporary social work (poverty and inequality, children and families, personalisation, mental health, adult social care, ethics) and invited an impressive array of contributors, in the main ‘activist academics’, to address each area.