Challenging Anthropocentricism in Social Work Through Ethics and Spirituality: Lessons from Studies in Human-Animal Bonds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the process of teaching theoretical foundations in a Canadian school of social work, I sought to combine my teaching of critical anti-oppressive practice (AOP) with established ideas from the field of human-animal bonds (HAB) and from the spiritual experiences arising within my relationships to companion animals. This article addresses the challenges I confronted by identifying speciesism, a specific form of discrimination based on species not recognized within social work's anti-oppressive practice paradigm. I argue that anti-oppressive social work is, in effect, oppressive because it informs a perspective that prioritizes humans over other animals, nature, and the planet. By drawing on the extensive body of literature in the field of HAB, which like AOP is informed by critical social theories, this article highlights how an AOP approach is delimited to diversity among humans. The implication of anthropocentrism as the central organizing principle of AOP social work is that it limits the profession's value framework and the potential for sustainable outcomes for well-being among all beings. Pathways to address these implications are offered by reference to work that explores issues of spirituality and ethics in both social work and HAB research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".