Social justice social work struggles in Canada: poverty, neoliberalism and symbolic resistance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his lead article in this book, Garrett notes historical and contemporary differences between England and Ireland, many of which find their roots in colonialism. Similarly, with the exception of First Nations people, the country currently known as Canada has deep colonial roots and tends to avoid discussions about occupying stolen land. The post-colonial/colonial relationship shapes many of the realities of the lives of First Nations and non-First Nations peoples (Kulchyski et al., 1999; Blackstock, 2010; Freeman, 2011). Based in the local, social work theory and practice have been slow to address the complexities of colonialism and the global political economies that sustain and benefit from it, but it is appropriate that critical social work texts weave these themes in from the start. In Canada, First Nations people are disproportionately involved with the child welfare system, reflecting their impoverishment, misrepresentation and marginalisation within the larger economic, political and social systems (Blackstock and Trocme, 2005). Other kinds of post- and neocolonial relations are also evident in the kinds of exploitive relationships most of the global North has with (un)developing countries and our governments’ unwillingness to assist Third World countries in humanitarian efforts or to support fair and sustainable development (Reader, 1999; Gardiner, 2007). The same inequity is echoed in the ways that many immigrants and refugees to Canada find themselves at the bottom of the labour market, pushed to the edges of our racially stratified society (Galabuzzi, 2006). Garrett poses two strong challenges to social work in his lead article. First, he asserts that it is ‘misguided to simply view social work – with children and families or any other group – as an entirely benign and emancipatory activity’.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.052 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
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".