Soft Cops or Social Justice Activists: Social Work’s Relationship to the state in the context of BLM and Neoliberalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the current dual context of Black Lives Matter/defund the police and calls for accountability to those whom social work has harmed as part of the state machinery, this article returns to the debate on state theory. The article explores three state-linked forms of care, coercion and control: stealth coercion/control (in aged-care); population-linked coercion/control, and police and carceral-linked coercion/control. The article analyses what is missing in state theory in a neoliberal world and argues that social work needs models of practice and theory that are themselves a form of resistance and relative autonomy from the state in that they challenge the oppressive state machinery while making demands on the state for equity and fairness. This model permits social work to be humble in the face of lived experience and grounded in the priorities of the community, rather than uncritically legitimising state-linked oppression and securing the ground for profit and accumulation. The article concludes that while this social justice-engaged model will be essential for those moving into the new practice contexts resulting from defunding the police, it is also a model that will serve to strengthen the relevance and integrity of all social work practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.146 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".