Introduction: social work future(s)—what social work does the world need now?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This special issue of Social Work & Society includes contributions made to an online conference held in June 2021 that invited speculative engagement with the question What social work does the world need now? The aim of the conference was to create space for uncommon and potentially less intelligible ideas and problematics, and in so doing, foster disciplinary engagement with the possible futures of social work in the context of major societal, environmental and technological changes. To lay out the landscape for the articles that follow, in this editorial, we explore the meaning of the future, as it relates to the trajectory of modernism, through the historical philosophy of Reinhart Koselleck. At this juncture, where existential threats from environmental degradation and new technologies, dominate a zeitgeist of existential angst we question the norms that brought humanity to this point. With scholars from science and philosophy, we conclude that modernism has been destablised, and its norms of human exceptionalism and eternal progress have expired. We argue that in this context, to be of use, social work, a progeny of modernism, must revisit the terms of its relationships and its purpose.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.006 |
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".