The Politics of the Textbook, Revisited: Centering Changing Understandings of Social and Environmental Justice

Purpose and background: Current and anticipated effects of the global climate crisis increasingly pressure state anchored and human focused social science disciplines like social work to revisit our traditional scope and inherited units of analysis and intervention for their methodological nationalism and anthropocentrism. Introductory undergraduate textbooks introduce and reinforce the boundaries of how disciplines understand their scope and identity and are therefore a promising site of both research and intervention. Although social work has engaged in textbook research, we have yet to examine how our field conceptualizes the natural environment or changing understandings of social and environmental justice more generally. The present study therefore investigates representations of the natural environment and social justice in popular undergraduate textbooks as a means to address this gap and support social work to adapt to changing environments.

Methods: All Canadian schools of social work offering English-language undergraduate programs were invited to participate (N=30), with 20 schools providing information on textbook assignment (n=20). Comparative qualitative content analysis was used to examine the six (6) most frequently assigned introductory textbooks.

Results: Most popular textbooks are new editions of texts first published 20 years ago and evince an approach to social justice that corresponds with Canadian multiculturalism discourse and state census categories. In line with this approach, a number of imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) and imagined geographies (Edward Said) are evident—English and French (as founding peoples), Indigenous (as original peoples), and racialized peoples (as new Canadians)—organizing simplified temporal and moral claims to influence and entitlement that lag behind the diversity and politics of contemporary social work classrooms and everyday life. Conflicts between liberal-legal settler social justice traditions and Indigenous sovereignty movements are rarely, and then only minimally, acknowledged. When included, the natural environment is most often articulated in relation to Indigenous peoples, international social work, or as a future challenge for the profession.

Conclusions and implications: Textbooks are important repositories of generally recognized histories, debates, and knowledge, and as such, play a central role in the reproduction of social work. Given this central role, textbooks are important sites of intervention in support of broader progressive social impacts. All textbooks analyzed evinced forms of methodological nationalism and anthropocentrism commonly critiqued in contemporary environmental thought. Future textbooks will need to engage more directly with the environment as a problem of the here and now. These texts must also directly engage and explore differences and conflicts between state and law anchored settler social justice traditions and Indigenous sovereignty movements and claims. Research into how social and environmental domains were historically understood in the development of social work can help us understand how we have participated in building ways of life that are now considered unsustainable and imagine how we might adapt our work for changing environments.