Summer School - Social Justice: A Normative Foundation for Social Work?, 6-9 June 2017, Basel, Switzerland

Subject: Social Justice: A Normative Foundation for Social Work?

Social justice is often proposed as an important value of social work. For the International Federation of Social Work social justice is, alongside human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversity, a core ethical principle of social work. Therefore, social workers "have a responsibility to promote social justice, in relation to society generally, and in relation to the people with whom they work." However, although social justice is proclaimed as such a core value, social workers have found it a slippery concept to define. Contemporary efforts to trace the roots of social justice-oriented social work focus on the settlement house movement.Current social work literature on social justice often focuses on the concepts of oppression, fairness and justice, the capability approach, recognition, human rights and the like. More systematically, however, social justice can be described in libertarian, utilitarian, contractual, egali-tarian, and communitarian ways, being a fairly new paradigm of modern societies. Whereas the general idea of jus-tice has a long tradition in human history, the idea of social justice is developing in an era of modernity in which the notion of the universal equality of human beings is fundamental. With the French Revolution of 1789, which postulat-ed freedom, equality and fraternity as core principles of modern societies, the idea of social justice became a key normative concept. The French Revolution brought about a fundamental social and political change, as it transformed the idea of poverty as a social fact, as god-given fate, into a human-made phenomenon. This meant that such condi-tions can also be changed by human action. Since then, the social sphere has become a sphere of social and politi-cal action, and the notion of social justice a normative guide and measure of social relations. Yet, it is difficult to de-fine what social justice means for social work, and to decide how it should be promoted in its different fields, including of youth, family, employment, health, migration and diversity. Hence, in social work theory and professional practice it has been argued that a normative perspective is not needed for professional social work and that indeed, given its strongly normative character, such an orientation endangers professional social work action. This debate about so-cial justice is very heated, not only in national disciplinary theory and practices, but also in international discourse. The summer school aims to identify the social justice discourses that prevail in different national contexts, and the current political and social problems that fuel current debates on social justice in social work.