Social Work Artfully, Beyond Borders and Boundaries, Christina Sinding and Hazel Barnes, Editors. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015

Often when the link between art and social work is considered, the two fields remain distinct and separate. The discussion is taken up as if art is a technique to aid in interpersonal helping relations or social workers aid artists to better understand the social significance of their work. The interdisciplinary nature is such that the relationships are simple and each field stays fully intact, not sullying the other. In 2010 Christina Sinding met Hazel Barnes while attending the Africa Research Conference in Applied Drama and Theatre in South Africa. From that meeting an international workshop was held and the book Social Work Artfully was born. In this book art and social work no longer remain distinct realms. At times as a social worker I am surprised at how close the interventions of the arts are to the purposes and nature of social work and inversely how artistically rendered social work practice can be. This is not a book about art as a method or a technique, instead it is about imagining a way forward for social work while remaining true to our roots of social justice. The purpose of the book is to engage the reader in imagining through the arts a conceptual and pragmatic renewal of social work. This renewal is contextualized within neoliberal globalization as well as enduring historical relations of domination and subordination in both South Africa and Canada. After an introductory section that provides context for each country, the text is divided into four sections: art for conscientization and re-storying selves; art for community and cultural healing, sustainability and resilience; art for transforming social relations; and art for social care practice. The broad themes that structure the book are examined through recounting of direct artful interventions with communities as varied as young refugees and migrant children in South Africa, persons with intellectual disabilities in Canada, Indigenous people living with HIV and AIDS, as well as Canadian and South African social work students, social workers, nurses, and academics. The focus on the arts unveils a wide array of social practices, some of which we may take for granted or have forgotten altogether in a neoliberal context that values efficiencies and reductive measurements of labour. Other practices we have not imagined within the field of social work at all. In a short review, I cannot do justice to the intricate reflections on community involvement through interventions that interweave art and justice in each chapter. Instead I have chosen to list some of the ways we can reimagine practice with the help of the authors. A sample of the practice concepts offered include: safe space, thicker stories, subordinate story lines (Pretorius and Kellen); deep listening, quietness and stillness, weaving of stories (Jackson et al); safe play, iterative practice and use of metaphor (McGillicuddy and Pretorius); new subjectivities, psycho-political interventions, the dialectic between agency and structure (Smith and Nathane-Taulela); social identity, critical analysis of tragedy and myth, imaginative space (Gumede); communal existence and value, playfulness, physicalization (Barnes); creative imagination and stories, poetic strategies as distancing technique (Chinyowa); self representation, critical reflection (Fudge Schormans) improvisation, embodied understandings of relationship (Paton) and in-between spaces, co-remembrance (McGillilcuddy et al). Although not an exhaustive list of practices, I list these techniques and concepts to show a plethora of new possibilities for social work practice. The authors illustrate that social influence of art need not be obtuse or abstract. At the same time, the practices are open so that they contribute to evoking, imagining, and practicing re-humanized social relations and cultures that are open to social justice and hope. This lifts us from the …