A Poetics of Social Work: Personal Agency and Social Transformation in Canada, 1920-1939

Carolyn Campbell is an assistant professor at Dalhousie University’s
Maritime School of Social Work.

Asserting that it is “in our interest to explore how concepts of
social change, social good, and social services have been expressed
though time,” Moffatt offers a detailed examination of four prominent
Canadian social workers active in the 1920s and 1930s. In analyzing the
life, work, and thought of Edward J. Urwick, Dorothy Livesay, Carl A.
Dawson, and Charlotte Whitton, Moffatt deconstructs a number of tenets
of social work epistemology and “uncovers a richness of interpretation
about social life and the nature of social service and social work
during the interwar years.”

In the introduction and Chapter 1, Moffatt situates the emergence of
Canadian social work—exemplified by the development of social work
schools, an increased reliance on research and science, and the
development of professional organizations—within the social and
political context of the time. Challenging the commonly held view that
academics and practitioners uniformly embraced a scientific or
technological approach to practice, he asserts that the development of
social work epistemology and practice was both complex and contested.

The analysis of the similarities and differences among the four
subjects presented in the next four chapters admirably supports this
assertion. For example, while all were concerned about social
disadvantage and wanted to facilitate change in both personal relations
and societal structures, the moral, religious, epistemological, and
ethical foundations of their work varied immensely. Urwick sought his
foundational truths in social philosophy, Livesay in political economy,
Dawson in science, and Whitton in Christianity. Livesay and Dawson were
modernists, searching for new practice truths and understandings, but
Urwick and Whitton sought moral prescriptions as guides to practice.
Urwick and Dawson enjoyed the benefits of gender privilege, while
Whitton and Livesay suffered from gender discrimination. Urwick and
Livesay suspected the power relations they saw as inherent in
technological approaches to practice, while Dawson and Whitton promoted
such approaches, albeit for different reasons. Moffatt explores these,
and other issues, to deconstruct the common dualistic understanding of
social work as a struggle between individual cure and control or
societal change and reform, concluding that there was a “grouping of
interlinked subjectivities that contributed to patterns of thinking
rather than evidence of two distinct points of view.”

Moffatt offers us a well-written book that expands our understanding of
the evolution of Canadian social work, invites us to reconsider our
“foundational truths,” and challenges us to consider “the
influence of historical social work thought on contemporary thought and
practice.”