resistance and contestation is carried through everyday actions and quiet solidarities of mutual care and support; it explains how this happened during the decade of austerity in spite of earlier ideas that feminism and anti-racism had had their day; and it links to the prefigurative politics explored in chapter 7.
In chapter 6 I turn back to one of the four crises in chapter 3 – care and social reproduction and its links to transnational mobility – to examine the phenomenon of migrant care workers who move to care for the families and households in richer countries, often leaving their own children behind to be looked after by others. The chapter develops an analysis of the imbricating scales of global, national and interpersonal that migrant care workers inhabit. At the global level are both the care market and the possibilities for reform and advocacy through international organizations and transnational migrant support groups. At the national scale migrant care work is shaped by the ways care practices and policies intersect with employment policies which devalue care work and rules and regulations around migration which deem care work unskilled. At the interpersonal scale are a complex of social relations between the migrant care worker and the person for whom she cares or works. At all scales, this is about the intersections of inequalities of gender, race, class, migration status and nationality, underpinned by geo-political inequalities between richer and poorer nations, historically constituted in colonial relations of racialized servitude. This raises challenging questions for the meaning of global social justice. I argue that there are a number of immediate strategies that would improve the position of migrant care workers, but, in the long term, the complex relations of inequality it embodies require, for a start, that the everyday relations of paid and unpaid work are not subsumed under the goals of economic growth but become central to global social justice and strategies for sustainability.
The third and final part of the book explores praxis. Chapter 7 brings many of the themes of the book together. Recalling the point made earlier that some of the most significant struggles today are around the provision of care and support, around climate change and around the dehumanization of racialized groups and migrants, I explore three sets of political ethics – by political, I mean ethics that are not abstracted but grounded in struggles for emancipation. I examine the ethics of care, environmental ethics and decolonial ethics. While there are differences across and within these ethical positions, they share a critique of Western-centric liberal notions of rational white male, able-bodied, heterosexual autonomy. They also challenge neoliberal values of individualism, autonomy and competition and the dependence of capitalism upon economic growth. Instead they promote interdependence, reciprocity, human flourishing and sustainability. Together they expand the notion of interdependence to include moral obligations not only to distant strangers across the world but also to the planet and its non-human and living organisms, to future generations’ right to inherit a sustainable planet, and to those past generations who suffered slavery and other forms of dehumanization from colonialism and imperialism. They point to new models for the economy, for deliberative democracy and for the recognition of different forms of knowledge that incorporate a new pluriversal humanism. I combine these guiding principles with the resurgence of prefigurative politics of civil society actors and their attempts to develop in new ways the principles of multiple interdependencies, relationality, democratic deliberation and interpersonal, local and translocal solidarities. With these in mind, I explore commonalities and tensions in different proposals for a social commons and a changed relationship between people and the state, emphasizing the urgency of the need to reimagine the welfare state.
The implications of these and other analyses in the book for teachers, researchers, students and scholar activists are taken up in chapter 8 as a conclusion. I summarize the theoretical approaches in the book and then look at social policy as a field of study in terms of, first, reconstituting its knowledge base with an emphasis on decolonizing the discipline; second, developing relational knowledge and practices; and, third, applying collective reimagination and dedication to the reconstruction of social policy in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis.
Appendix I provides an elaboration of the analytical frame of family–nation–work–nature and its relation to welfare. Appendix II links future to past by situating the author in a history of social policy over the past fifty-five years.
Notes
1 1. ‘Prefigurative’ politics means practising in the here and now that which is demanded for the future: for example, setting up alternative services which meet the needs of women in which policies and practices are deliberated by women service-users.
2 2. They are here described differently from Williams (2016).
2 A Critical and Intersectional Approach to Social Policy
Introduction
In the previous chapter I introduced two ideas. First, that, while there have been major analytical insights on welfare states from many of the feminist, anti-racist, political economy, disability, age, sexuality, and ecology-related critiques of social policy, the core of social policy has been slow or differentially selective in acknowledging them. Second, that, while many of these critiques offer profound analyses, they remain relatively disparate; what is important is to draw together their commonalities, strengths and insights in a way that respects their specificities and argues for their central significance in the discipline of social policy. This chapter elaborates both these ideas, setting out the places different critiques have occupied in relation to mainstream social policy and looking at the combination of political and intellectual forces that have shaped their continuing marginality. In the second half I examine the origins and re-emergence of intersectionality as theory, method and praxis, looking at its potential and pitfalls. I argue that, if combined with some of the key concepts from critical approaches to social policy, it has much to offer in pulling together the disparateness of different critical approaches and in thinking through issues of a transformative perspective on social policy. In sum, I offer an intersectionally informed and multi-focal critical approach. The subsequent chapters apply this in different ways.
Remarginalization of the social
There are a several reasons as to why many of the issues raised by the earlier and subsequent critiques around gender, race, disability, sexuality and age were sidelined or only partly accommodated in mainstream social policy. First, it is important to understand the breadth of these critiques’ new frames of analysis of the post-war welfare state. Feminist critiques were to highlight the relationship between the public sphere of work and politics and the private sphere of family and personal relationships. Within that was an examination of the gendered assumptions attached to care, dependency and patriarchal power, as well as the exclusions attached to non-heteronormative identities, subjectivities and relationships. Care and dependency were also critically re-examined from the viewpoints of disabled people, children and older people, challenging bureaucratic and expert dominance over service-users and attempting to prefigure new democratic and participatory ways of doing welfare. In addition, the links between anti-colonial struggles and anti-racism brought the colonial and postcolonial global context of an international division of labour and geo-political inequalities to the fore. This went well beyond the limitations of the hermetically sealed single-nation view of the welfare state. It uncovered a critical understanding of the role of welfare states in nation-building and especially in the rubric of social imperialism in forms of early
