Radical hope: poverty-aware practice for social work

How social workers practise their profession is influenced by paradigmatic assumptions. The way they answer the questions ‘What is the world?’ (its ontology), ‘What is valid knowledge and how is it acquired?’ (its epistemology) and ‘For what purpose?’ (its axiology) lead to specific ways of doing practice, be it consciously or unconsciously. In Radical hope, Michal Krumer-Nevo, Professor of Social Work at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel), introduces the Poverty-Aware Social Work Paradigm (PAP) as a framework that offers a new way of thinking about how social work can address poverty, challenging the conservative and structural paradigm that have historically been dominant in social work. The paradigm asserts that social workers should base their practice on a strong analytical stance towards social structures, ideologies and constructions. From this analysis, social workers should take a stand, adopt an approach of resisting poverty, side with people living in poverty in their daily struggles, adopt a positional and engaged stance, and reshape practice as a vehicle of social justice. Grounded in the tradition of critical social work, the PAP sees poverty as a violation of human rights,