Date, time & Location: INEQ – Helsinki Inequality Initiative, Vuorikatu 3 (room 209) or via Zoom on 15.9.2023 at 13.00-15:30.
Welcome to this book launch organized by INEQ – Helsinki Inequality Initiative in collaboration with the Social Work Unit. The launch takes place at Vuorikatu 3, room 209, University of Helsinki on Friday 15.9.2023 at 13.00-15.00 (Finnish time) and via Zoom.
The event includes an introduction to the book by the author, excerpts of readings from reviewers and warmly welcomes everyone to an open discussion on its topics!
Refreshments, coffee and tea, will be served!
Registration
Please register for this event by clicking the following link: https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/124620/lomakkeet.html. If you wish to participate online, you will be sent the link to the Zoom session a few days before the event.
This book shapes a situated body politics to re-think, re-write and de-colonise social work as a post-anthropocentric discipline headed towards glocalization, where human and non-human embodiments and agencies are entangled in glocal environmental worlds. The book constitutes key literature for researchers, educators, practitioners, and activists in social work, sociology, architecture, art and creative writing, feminist- and postcolonial studies, human geography and post-anthropocentric philosophy. It offers the readers sustainable ways to re-think and re-write social work towards a glocal- and post-anthropocentric more-than-human worldview.
The Body Politics of Glocal Social Work. Essays on the Post-Anthropocentric Condition is now available at the University of Helsinki Library and can be ordered here.
Mona B. Livholts [hon/hän/she] is Professor of Social Work in the Department of Social Sciences, Affiliated with INEQ and Urbaria, University of Helsinki, Finland and one of the leading authors on creative writing in the social sciences. She Founder of the Network for Reflexive Academic Writing Methodologies (RAW) (2008-2017); Secretary and Executive Board Member for Finland in The European Association of Social Work, EASSW. Livholts works with glocal-, post-anthropocentric, feminist- and postcolonial perspectives in social work and transdisciplinary. She has invented new forms for creative writing and art-based methodologies, such as the thinking writing subject, post/academic writing and the untimely academic novella by uses of feminist literary fiction, memory work, diaries, letters, poetry, and photography. Research topics include sexual violence, gender, space and memory, monuments and narrative inequality, and environmental exhaustion. Livholts has published extensively in Swedish and English, including: ‘Women’, Welfare, Textual Politics and Critique. An Invitation to a ThinkingWriting Methodology in the Study of Welfare (2011), Genus och det akademiska skrivandets former (Eds. with Bränström Öhman 2007), Vanlig som vatten. Manlighet och normalitet i mediernas berättelser om våldtäkt (2007), Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies (Ed. 2012), Discourse and Narrative Methods. Theoretical Departures, Analytical Strategies and Situated Writing (with Tamboukou 2015), Social Work in a Glocalised World (Eds. with Bryant 2017), Situated Writing as Theory and Method. The Untimely Academic Novella (2019) and The Body Politics of Glocal Social Work. Essays in the Post-Anthropocentric Condition (2022).
"This book responds to a growing need for post-anthropocentric methodologies to address urgent change. It is an inspiration to a broad range of disciplines, far beyond the field of social work, and especially valuable for spatial practitioners and researchers in art, architecture, and urban planning, among others. In her essays, Mona Livholts shows ways of writing and how they impact creative and critical thinking. She inspires novel approaches to transform social and spatial practices from the position of embodiment and with respect to our entanglements within more-than-human worlds. This book is a treasure for the education of social and spatial practitioner and researchers and should be included on their reading lists."
Meike Schalk, Associate Professor in Urban Design and Urban Theory and Docent in Architecture, KTH School of Architecture, Sweden
"In this engaging and timely book, Mona Livholts tackles the question, what might critical re-thinking and re-writing social work knowledge be in the post-anthropocentric era. The non-conventional essayistic spaces of the book foster creative and dialogical encounters with the writing self, with human and non-human life, and environmentalities. These spaces challenge the separated notions of nature and culture, and human and non-human actors. Livholts shows how post-anthropocentric knowledge production is not only a question of content but one of form. She inspires us to explore life writing genres, such as diaries, letters, poetry, and photography, all of which can be utilized as starting points to seek renewed knowledge into creative theorization, practice, and writing. By foregrounding embodiment, exhaustion, and above all, glocality - a fusion of local and global – Livholts’ situated writing bridges the personal with the planetary and paves the way for much needed post-anthropocentric worldviews in academic work and beyond. The book will be highly useful for active scholars across disciplines as well as interested readers more generally."
Riikka Hohti, Postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Education and Docent in Childhood Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland
"This book takes the reader on a rich voyage afloat eight essayistic pieces which carry Mona Livholt’s propositions for re-thinking and re-conceptualising social work towards a glocal and post-anthropocentric worldview. Encouraging readers to engage in Slow and diffractive reading, the book argues the imperative of a glocal lens, a complex fusion of global and local beyond the binary itself that acknowledges human-nature entanglements. In the essays, beautifully stitched together, we are guided by a generous sharing of the author’s subjective experiences and observations, diffracted through complex decolonial, indigenous, new materialist and posthumanist scholarship, to walk along with the author on a journey of radical reframing and reimagining of social work. Most inspiring is the way in which the book models its arguments through its creative, dialogical, experimental and diffractive narrative form. Through each essay the book disrupts normative logics of scholarship, fashioning a scholarship beyond the authoritative, cartesian, disembodied and non-relational academic subject. While primarily speaking with and through social work, the book offers much for critical decolonial, feminist and queer scholars and others across disciplinary boundaries and geopolitical spaces, who are ‘staying with the trouble’ as Donna Haraway has urged, and are committed to responsible and careful engagements in current times of planetary challenge."
Tamara Shefer, Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa
"Timely, thought proving, elegant, and purposefully transgressive in the attempt to offer and foster diverse ways to reconceptualise social work in the Anthropocene – and forward. Building on sustained work on glocality and creative narrative writing genres, Mona Livholts’ Body Politics of Glocal Social Work: Essays on the Post-Anthropocentric Condition paves the way for paradigmatic shifts towards post-disciplinary knowledge in social work and beyond. The collection stands out as coherent and carefully thought contribution for the necessary(il)y polyphonic reconceptualising of social work. Along with its theoretically intertwined chapters aka ’open-ended essayistic spaces’, readers are invited to engage with critical thinking, fusions, and creative encounters of various sorts, alert to their own bodily, relational, and environmental locations and starting points in so doing. An eloquent and philosophical treat and companion to stop and think about emergent conceptualizations in social work, as well as generally."
Satu Ranta-Tyrkkö, Senior lecturer, Docent. Department of philosophy and social sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Finland