Social Work and Social Care seminar: Social Work, Neoliberalism and Neo-eugenics

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Time: 4.30pm - 6.00pm
Venue: FL 1027, Kingston Hill campus, Kingston Hill, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT2 7LB
Price: free
Speaker(s): Dr Gurnam Singh, Coventry University

The crisis of neoliberalism is resulting in a new common sense about welfare and of welfare recipients.
This is built around a three-pronged strategy; first, there is an ongoing and sustained attack on progressive sociological critiques of power and oppression;
second, in the attempt to develop holistic bio -psycho-social approaches to understanding such things as human resilience and child abuse, there is a diminishing of focus on poverty and the damaging effects of structural inequalities (Hill and Hart, 2016; Garrett, 2016); and third, as an explanatory framework for the root cause of human problems and most worryingly a justification for social work intervention, we see an uncritical embrace of ‘an increasingly political biology' in the guise of ‘epigenetics', which seeks to link environmental factors to gene expression. (White and Wastell, 2016:1).

In contrast to the previous crude eugenics of the early 20th century, that social destiny can be simply determined according to genetic make-up, this contemporary manifestation, hides behind ‘a vastly more complex biological cloak.' (Dorling, 2011: 113).

This seminar will seek to uncover some of the worrying trends towards an altogether more sinister model of practice that is deeply implicated by what Katz (2013) terms ‘neo -eugenics'. Having offers a critical analysis of nature and scale of the challenge, the chapter concludes by offering some thoughts about how progressive anti-oppressive social workers can/should respond to confront these new and altogether more sophisticated manifestations of human oppression.

For further information about this event:

Contact: FHSCE, Anastasiya Stravolemova
Tel: 0208 725 4735
Email: HSCE-events@sgul.kingston.ac.uk