10. RETHINKING SOCIAL WORK CONFERENCE: POVERTY AND SOCIAL WORK

Click here for impressions from the conference: Video 1 (1 minute); Video 2 (7 minutes)

One of the aims of the RSW conference series, supported by the Turkey Country Office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) since its inception, is to create a discussion space for social work research and practice in the light of current developments in Turkey and around the world. The ninth of the “Rethinking Social Work” conference series was entitled “Care Work in the Wake of the Pandemic: Crisis, Possibilities and New Solutions” and took place at Istanbul Kent University. The eighth conference in 2020, carried out online, was entitled “Social Work in the Rebuilding of the Social in the Wake of the Pandemic.” The conference series has attracted many international participants from Germany, Britain and the US in addition to scholars based in Turkey. You may view information on past “Rethinking Social Work” conferences on the conference web page: http://www.sosyalhizmetleriyenidendusunmek.com/.

This year, the title and themes of the conference have been decided through the deliberations of an international advisory board. One of our goals is to open to debate the concept of poverty itself and policies for poverty alleviation. We also hope to place poverty as a concept and phenomenon in its proper global political economic context and within socio-economic inequalities. With that in mind, some of the issues we hope to tackle are the myth of economic growth and alternative approaches to sustainability through the contributions of conference participants. We also want to discuss new scholarship on poverty and social inequality, especially in Turkey, and to critically assess social policies and social work interventions that claim to fight poverty and inequality. Among the questions that we hope will be raised in the conference are: how can transformative social policies be built and how can radical social work interventions be designed.