A Poetics of Social Work: Personal Agency and Social Transformation in Canada, 1920-1939
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<p>In <em>A Poetics of Social Work</em>, Ken Moffatt considers the epistemological influences in the field of Canadian social work and social welfare from 1920 to 1939. Here, modernist constructs of knowledge are explored through the analysis of the thought of leading social welfare practitioners, namely Dorothy Livesay, Carl Dawson, Charlotte Whitton, and E.J. Urwick. These four figures represent a wide cross-section of Anglo-Canadian social thought at two of Canada's most influential universities (McGill and Toronto), and Moffatt's study of their thinking reveals the presence of a diversity of approaches to social work and social change during this period.</p> <p>By challenging the notion that human values and humanitarian concerns were abandoned in favour of science, empirical findings, and technical interpretation of authoritative knowledge, the author attempts to expand the concept of the social work knowledge base and explores how social work emerged as a profession in Canada. Moffatt's study presents a broad context for analysis, and provides fascinating reading and source material for those interested in history, philosophy, literature, and biography, as well as social work and the social sciences.</p>
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".