Social work education and carcerality

Abstract

This doctoral study examined the experiences of social work practitioners who became social work academics. Interviews with social work academics from five English universities explored career pathways, transition experiences and engagement with academic identities and roles, conceptualised within a Foucauldian theoretical perspective. There is a growing body of knowledge about the experiences of practitioners from various disciplines who become academics in their field (Field, 2012; Findlow, 2012) but notably, there is a lack of empirical evidence about social work practitioners. Using and extending Foucault’s (1991) concept of disciplinary power (which theorises about how society is regulated through observation and social norms), this paper argues that academic practice of social work educators is encapsulated within a carceral (controlling) network in which they are “docile bodies” (Foucault, 1991: 138) subject to observation, actively challenging “normalising judgements” (Foucault, 1991: 177) and part of the disciplinary mechanism of surveillance and normalisation of students