Assembling Violence: Social Work's Complicities with Fashioning Ideas of the Unworthy and the Erasure of Need
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis grapples with the inadequacies present within the function of contemporary social work, which fosters a practice that conceptualizes idealized visions of ‘those in need’, rather than attending to the real needs of those accessing social work programs. Specifically setting out to examine these institutional failings as they relate to the growing number of individuals experiencing homelessness across Canada, the paper introduces a guiding theoretical and epistemic framework, termed the ‘Assemblative Process,’ centred primarily on unpacking the constitution of ‘assemblative bodies.’ This work progresses through the three stages of this framework, first engaging in a critical genealogical historiographic study of social work’s development from the Enlightenment to our Colonial-Capitalist present, culminating in a technology capable of exerting state power over members of our community. It then utilizes this foundational understanding of social work to engage in a hybridized comparative policy analysis rooted within critical narrative/discourse to constitute a ‘point-in-time’ representation of the ‘assemblative body’ as it exists within both the 17th to 19th century Vagrancy Acts and Hamilton, Ontario’s Encampment Protocol, which was rescinded in January 2025. The final aspect of this analysis involves a ‘diffractive analysis’ of the findings across both the first two parts, leading to a discussion which suggests that perhaps our critiques of contemporary social work practice may be better oriented to other facets of the profession.
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 | 0.032 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.246 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.035 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.024 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".