The spirit in social work: ecospirituality, holistic and sustainable social work practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This special double issue, The Spirit in Social Work: Ecospirituality, Holistic and Sustainable Social Work Practice, emerges from the 2023 Canadian Society for Spirituality & Social Work (CSSSW) conference held at Dalhousie University. It presents 14 original contributions responding to an urgent need for social work to engage with ecospirituality and environmental sustainability. Historically, mainstream social work has marginalized the natural world, focusing narrowly on human-centric systems and built environments. In the context of escalating climate emergencies, global ecological degradation, and a concurrent mental health crisis—marked by eco-anxiety, climate grief, and solastalgia—this issue underscores the necessity of rethinking social work’s paradigms and ethical frameworks.The collected works explore ecospirituality as a holistic, relational approach that affirms interconnectedness with nature and recognizes the spiritual dimensions of environmental justice. Articles span diverse themes, including Buddhist and Jewish ecological ethics, queer ecospiritual identity, climate grief education, earth-based ritual practices, and culturally informed approaches to grief, trauma, and mental wellness. Contributions also engage broader holistic spiritual practices among marginalized populations, expanding the field’s understanding of sustainability, health, and resilience.With the updated 2023 CASWE-ACFTS educational standards now emphasizing environmental sustainability and spiritual ethics in social work, this issue offers timely, critical reflections and innovative practices. It invites practitioners, educators, and researchers to reconceptualize nature not merely as resource or setting, but as a living community of which humans are a part, advancing ecospirituality as a foundational ethos for sustainable, compassionate, and just social work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".