The course will focus on key discourses shaping contemporary social work and human services.

We will consider how and where these discourses intersect with practice, and what the consequences of these discourses are for people who are marginalised, oppressed, or otherwise in vulnerable positions.

We will look at the ways certain phenomena are constructed in the social work context, for example risk, vulnerability, responsibility and care, and how these discourses shape fields of practice, necessitating certain approaches and foreclosing others.