Postmodern Social Work: Reflective Practice and Education, Ken Moffatt. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019, 248 pages

Ken Moffatt, a professor in Ryerson University’s School of Social Work and the holder of Ryerson’s Jack Layton Chair which inter alia promotes the arts for a greater understanding of our damaged world, takes us on a captivating journey, both intellectual and personal, of teaching social work from a reflective postmodern point of view. The book glows with radiance and sparkling intensity and is a wonderful antidote to the poverty of imagination that all too often characterizes social work scholarship, research and writing. Steering Moffatt’s analysis are two concepts: we do not possess a fixed identity and truths are not fixed but fluid. His approach can be portrayed fittingly as unfixed. It is worth noting that for the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his colleague Felix Guattari, whose work Moffatt incorporates adroitly, philosophy is the invention of concepts. One of the marked achievements of the book is that it brings the somatic and the intellectual together, thus healing the Cartesian error of the mind/body split. Here Moffatt opens a wide and welcoming gate for an intricate rethinking of social work thought, education, and practice. In an introduction and seven finely crafted chapters, Moffatt illuminates the current context which he describes as “the speeded-up processes of capitalism, and the onslaught of omnipresent technologies.” Fully on display is Moffatt’s astute grasp of neoliberalism, new managerialism, and technology, as a confluence of forces creating the contemporary world. The chapters are bookended, the beginning and the end, with penetrating analyses of precariousness, now an even more unsettling presence with the Virus circulating globally. He suggests that precariousness presses in on us at the broadest social levels as well as on how we construct ourselves. Moffatt puts forth his startling position as an educator: “I ultimately argue for a self that is open to precariousness that is experienced as coming undone.” It is within this context that the central theme of the book unfolds: postmodern reflective practice. This necessitates, Moffatt informs us, bringing to our understandings questions of vulnerability, marginalization, colonialism and exploitation. Early in the book, Moffatt outlines the contribution of philosopher Donald Schon, as providing a formative framework in the development of professional reflective practice. Schon’s 1980s books on the reflective practitioner point to reflective artistry over technical rationality. Throughout, Moffatt draws into the ambit of his discourse a number of key postmodern philosophers: Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Butler, Bauman, Kristeva. He is impressively at ease with these complex thinkers, which adds a richness and multilayered consideration to all he writes about and the book provides a Northrop Frye educated imagination for social workers. Where so much of social work education is still rooted in an eighteenth-century Enlightenment view of what constitutes knowledge, with its adornments of rationalism and empiricism, Moffatt leads us away from Weber’s iron cage of modernity to what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid modernity. In liquid modernity, Bauman writes “all social forms melt faster than the new ones can be cast.” Surely, Bauman had in mind Marx and Engels’ comment in the 1848 Communist Manifesto, “all that is solid melts into air.” Interpreting Bauman, Moffatt notes that with all in constant flux “the impact of economic and social uncertainty is unevenly distributed according to one’s gender, race and nationality.” Julia Kristeva’s work brings Moffat to an inspired exploration of images in urban capitalist settings and he builds on her observation of commercial imagery that hurtles toward us at a fragmented breakneck speed. These images even invade his classroom through the window in downtown Toronto. He reflects on how these onslaughts affect his psyche and the psyche of …