Critical Clinical Social Work: Counterstorying for Social Justice. Catrina Brown & Judy E. MacDonald (Eds.). Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2020, 442 pages

In Critical Clinical Social Work: Counterstorying for Social Justice (2020), editors Catrina Brown and Judy E. MacDonald bring together a collection of papers from educators at Dalhousie University’s School of Social Work. The collection aims to demonstrate the ways in which clinical social work practice can also function as social justice work. The contributors to this collection critique the neoliberal landscape of contemporary organizations and challenge the pathologizing discourses that shape difficulties experienced by people from equity-seeking communities. Neoliberalism’s preoccupation with skills as representative of worker competency is critiqued, in addition to the ways in which social difficulties are understood as individual deficits, divorced from social context, history, and institutions. Brown and MacDonald critique this separation and, instead, draw important links between clinical social work and social justice goals. The gateway into examining how social work practice is political work is their use of the term “critical clinical” social work practice (p. 2). Brown and MacDonald describe “critical clinical” as social justice skills committed to non-pathologizing, contextual, and deconstructive practices. The focus is on a diversity of direct practices with communities that work towards narrative analysis, collaboration, and non-essentialized approaches to working with intersecting, diverse identities and concepts of the self as “preferred self” (p. 3). Central to the project of critical clinical social work is the commitment to centre counterstories as resistance to domination. The links between skills and social justice are explored through a variety of theoretical frameworks which include postmodernist, anti-oppressive, feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial theories. The editors state that the goals of critical clinical social work are to create transparency, equalize power relations between workers and service users, and support service users to have control over their own choices. Critical clinical as a concept runs through the text, anchoring each of the chapters in an exploration of how social work practices may lend themselves to de-centering dominance while bringing forth the lived experiences of marginalized communities. Clinical practice is explored across a diversity of social concerns such as violence, trauma, disabilities, mental health, substance use, child welfare, men’s use of violence, social work ethics, human–animal bonds, regulation of people living with HIV/AIDS, and Indigenous, Afrocentric and post-colonial practices. The strength of this collection is its anti-oppressive analysis, and it makes an important contribution to the anti-oppressive practice (AOP) canon in social work. Key tenets of AOP run through the analysis, supporting practices that centre on examinations of structural oppression, power relations (oppressor/oppressed), and critical reflection/reflexivity. Neoliberal practices designed to ‘fix’ the individual are replaced with commitments to examining community-informed support and action. The experiences of marginalized communities are centred as counterstories to highlight expressions of voice, power, and resistance. A key limitation of the collection is that it does not systematically apply postmodern and poststructural conceptions of discourse analysis and non-essentialism, as it claims to do. Important terms and ideas central to the book’s focus, such the terms “clinical” or “trauma,” need further explanation to examine their discursive production and the hidden assumptions within their operations. For example, how did the term “clinical” come to signify direct practice? There is an assumption that the term “clinical” will be understood as a signifier of direct practice, whereas historically it is a term that has been associated with the medicalization of services, or exclusively psychotherapy. Similarly, the use of the term “trauma,” which is also a centralizing discourse in the collection, needs further deconstruction to examine the historical emergence of the word and its productive qualities. Is “trauma” experienced similarly across different social issues and groups? Is “trauma” the only word to describe the effects of violence? “Trauma,” …