Publications by Year: 2020

The book is based on the author’s ongoing professional and academic endeavour to conceptualise the poverty-aware paradigm (PAP) and develop its implementation in policy and practice. Although the PAP is present throughout the book, the book is much more than a mere presentation of the paradigm. Rather, it addresses the manifestation of grand theories and critical ideas in interpersonal and social relationships. In this sense, the paradigm serves as an analytical lens through which abstract notions such as social injustice, power relationships and recognition operate in the lives of individuals and the work of social workers. By including personal accounts, case studies and performative texts, Krumer-Nevo emphasises the notion that dialogue is an essential feature of any transformational process, whether personal, social or political.

The introduction and first chapter are dedicated to outlining the PAP as a theoretical, ethical and practical framework for social work with people living in poverty. Combining a critical social analysis of poverty with relational notions, the paradigm asserts that poverty is a violation of human rights that people in poverty actively resist, that professional knowledge should be based on close relationships with services users and that social workers should stand by their service users in their struggle against poverty. In what follows, the book is divided into four sections, devoted to the different pillars of the paradigm: transformation, recognition, rights and solidarity.

The first section, ‘Transformation’, focuses on critical consciousness and is rooted in the notion that adopting the PAP (and critical thinking in general) requires individuals to undergo a transformative process of deconstructing and reconstructing their core assumptions and eventually changing the ways in which they practice. These chapters involve a deconstruction of mainstream practices and offer alternative, social-justice-based practices for talking, writing and teaching about poverty. The final chapter of this section is written in an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) format, offering readers ten critical poverty-aware answers to frequently asked (mainly conservative) questions. This chapter departs from the focus on social work practice and addresses the need to challenge and transform the wider public discourse on poverty. The following two sections, ‘Recognition’ and ‘Rights’, unfold the two focal points of the PAP practice: the politics of recognition and respect and the politics of redistribution.

Recognition is presented as an organising concept for acknowledging the subjectivity of service users in therapeutic relationships. Building on relational psychoanalytic theories (e.g. Benjamin, 1988) and linking them to critical theories (e.g. Fraser, 1995), this section of the book outlines what recognition means in the context of poverty. The first chapter offers a fresh view on the concept of therapy. Krumer-Nevo asserts that what makes social workers’ work therapeutic is not the setting in which they work or the content of their interventions, but rather their ability to create relationships of recognition with services users. The following chapters of this section address three areas in which social workers often fail to recognise service users’ subjectivity in the context of poverty: services users’ needs and knowledge, the emotional pain caused by poverty, and the ways in which service users resist poverty.

The third section, ‘Rights’, is dedicated to the politics of redistribution in direct practice. Unlike Maslow, who hierarchised basic and emotional needs, the PAP perceives these needs as interconnected. This section of the book argues that a focus on services users’ inner worlds is insufficient in the context of poverty and that rights-based practice is essential for poverty-aware social work. The four chapters of this section bring to the forefront two rights-based practices: active realisation of rights and material assistance.

The last section of the book, ‘Solidarity’, confronts the question of the position social workers take when they work with people in poverty. Two dimensions of the question of position are addressed here—the ethical and the practical. Using four case studies, this section reflects how ethical questions shape the everyday practice of social workers. What, for example, does the ethical stance of standing by look like when a child is at risk? How is the ethical stance of confronting structural injustice expressed in practice? The case studies concretise the abstract notion of solidarity, making it applicable and relevant to the work of social workers.

In sum, reading this book involves a constant movement between the academic and the poetic, the evocative and the analytical, and the theoretical and the practical. The author succeeds in integrating all of these into a single holistic and powerful experience of transformative learning that indeed opens a space for radical hope.