Contemporary Social Work Studies
180.jpg "Ashgate Book Series Listings")
Series Editor: Robin Lovelock, University of Southampton,
UK
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Selected titles from
this
series |
Contemporary Social Work Studies is a series
disseminating high quality new research and scholarship in the
discipline and profession of social work. The series promotes
critical engagement with contemporary issues relevant across the
social work community and captures the diversity of interests
currently evident at national, international and local levels. CSWS
is located in the School of Social Sciences (Social Work Studies
Division) at the University of Southampton, UK and is a development
from the successful series of books published by Ashgate in
association with CEDR (the Centre for Evaluative and Developmental
Research) from 1991.
Series Advisory Board:
Lena Dominelli, University of Durham, UK
Jan Fook, University of Southampton, UK
Peter Ford, University of Southampton, UK
Lorraine Gutiérrez University of Michigan, USA
Walter Lorenz, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Karen Lyons, London Metropolitan University, UK
Joan Orme, University of Glasgow, UK
Jackie Powell, University of Southampton, UK
Gillian Ruch, University of Southampton, UK
An Interview with Series Editor Robin Lovelock
What encouraged you to enter academia?
The belief that universities were committed above all to the
pursuit of understanding and therefore that academics were free to
devote themselves more or less exclusively to study in its various
forms. In so far as that was ever true for any but perhaps the most
privileged and/or gifted, it’s certainly much less so nowadays –
although one still probably has more autonomy in the academic world
than in most other walks of life, at least over when one does the
many and varied things one has to do. But in fact I’ve never
actually been a ‘proper’ academic, combining teaching, research and
writing; rather my appointments have been in a research capacity.
Moreover, the research I’ve done has mostly involved working
closely with social and health care agencies, so in that sense I’ve
always operated on the interface between academia and the world(s)
of policy and practice
What made you (decide to) initiate this
series?
In 1990 I set up a research centre, CEDR – the Centre for
Evaluative and Developmental Research; I thought a link with a
commercial publisher would provide an ideal outlet not only for
much of the Centre’s research but also that of colleagues in the
(then) Department of Social Work Studies at the University of
Southampton in which it was based. Ashgate supported this and thus
a series “published in association with CEDR” was born. 10 years
down the line I took early retirement and CEDR was phased out. By
that time the series was publishing a wider range of work, some of
it authored by colleagues not directly associated with Southampton,
and all parties, including myself, wanted it to continue. We
‘reconfigured’ the series as ‘Contemporary Social Work Studies’
(CSWS), with an international Advisory Board, and I believe it’s
gone from strength to strength.
What are your academic background and research interests
(and those of your co-editors/advisory board)?
My first degree was in Politics and Sociology. I then read for a
PhD in Political Theory but didn’t complete it. Much more recently
I took a Masters in that field, my abiding interests having
remained in political and social thought and in the philosophy and
methodology of the social sciences. I got a job in social care
research in the mid-70s – although it wasn’t called ‘social care’
at the time – and stayed with it, drawing on my more abstract
interests to make sense of the world in which I found myself. I
came late to an understanding of and commitment to social work per
se, when I moved between institutions to set up a new research
centre, CEDR. My Advisory Board is made up of senior social work
academics.
Very briefly, where do you see your discipline going in
the future?
Taking my ‘discipline’ as social work, I’ll avoid giving a very
specific answer by saying that I rely heavily on my Board to know
where it’s at and where it’s going! However, anyone straying to
this page is likely to be well aware that social work is at once
both a profession and a university-based discipline, and I think my
colleagues would agree with me that survival as both, preferably
inter-connectedly, is currently the first priority; indeed in many
ways that’s always been the case.
What has been the highlight of your academic career so
far?
I’ve mentioned that I retired several years ago, so I should
probably address that question in the past tense and delete “so
far”. In any case, the answer is setting up CEDR [see above] and
sustaining it for a decade or so, both with my close colleague
Jackie Powell. Anyone interested can find out more about CEDR’s
philosophy and work at http://www.cedr.soton.ac.uk/
In the present, I’m unashamedly rather proud of CSWS, which, as
I already explained, has its roots in CEDR, the continuing thread
being a commitment to encouraging critical reflection among social
work academics and practitioners.
Whose achievements would you like to emulate within your
own field?
In similar spirit to my previous answer, it’s probably too late
now! In the field I still regard as my intellectual home, a great
hero of mine is Jürgen Habermas, both for his breadth of
scholarship and for his commitment to being a “public
intellectual”. An eminent British political theorist who I greatly
admire, and who has written extensively on the moral and
philosophical underpinnings of social work and social policy (inter
al.), is (Lord) Raymond Plant. In the social work academy itself,
Bill Jordan shares the sense that political and moral philosophy,
and historical and political context, are crucial reference points
for the discipline and the profession. However, for me to even
think of emulating any of them is rather akin to my wanting to be
an Olympic champion.
What book (not from the series, but generally) has most
influenced your own work?
I’d choose the one which first brought me to Habermas:
Knowledge and Human Interests – although as he later
conceded to sympathetic critics such as Thomas McCarthy, its aim of
“getting behind the positivist’s back” by epistemological means was
in the end flawed. His subsequent attempt to ground a cognitive
social and political morality in a philosophical account of
language also seems now to have embodied essentially the same
unsustainable claim that “the truth will set us free”. These days
therefore, I find myself most in tune with those feminists
positively influenced by Habermas (e.g. Benhabib, Chambers, Fraser,
Warnke), who argue that we must be content with constructing a
political ethics, in which context his work is immensely valuable,
albeit that he himself has sought to make stronger claims. Habermas
has become more widely known to a social work audience of late, for
example through the work of Amy Rossiter, Stan Houston and Walter
Lorenz.
What do you find particularly interesting about your
role as series editor?
I love books and I’ve long been interested in the practical
aspects of publishing. Thus in many ways what I’ve enjoyed most is
working closely with a sequence of commissioning and desk/copy
editors, and with other Ashgate colleagues responsible for
publicity and marketing – the people who make a book ‘happen’ – as
well as with the authors whose ideas one can help find a place in
the public domain.
Any advice for people wanting to publish in your
series?
The ‘blurb’ for the series makes it clear that we’re looking for
high quality new research and scholarship, so I’d expect potential
authors to be aware of this. In particular, as I mentioned above,
the series seeks to encourage critical reflection. A theme linking
many recent titles, and which I/we hope will continue, is the
potential of social work to contribute to thought and action in the
context of the many challenges, global and local, which we face in
the 21st Century. Alongside that, however interesting and
appropriate its subject matter in these terms, this series editor
looks for evidence in a proposal that the book will have an
explicit and appropriate structure and that the author(s)/editor(s)
can articulate this clearly for the benefit of readers. I’m also
‘old-fashioned’ – if such it be – in believing that clarity of
expression requires careful attention to the meanings of words and
to matters of grammar and punctuation; so a proposal which suggests
that its author sees these as merely ‘for later’, the business of
copy editors and proof readers, will not impress!
What was the last book you read?
If I take that literally, I’m actually not sure – I don’t read
as much as I’d like to. However, assuming the question is really
about what I like to read when I do make the necessary time and
space, I’ve recently enjoyed The Form of Things by A.C.
Grayling, The Meaning of Sport by Simon Barnes, The
Discovery of France by Graham Robb, and The Second
Plane by Martin Amis.
Interview kindly received March 2009.