The Social Work and the More-than-human Special Interest Group (MTH SIG) brings together transnational scholars working on the ways in which the more-than-human, broadly defined, challenges human-focused social work research, education and practice. In different ways the Covid-19 pandemic, environmental emergency and human-made technologies each generate political and economic instabilities that amplify existing inequalities between humans, but also between humans and non-human life. These events and phenomena draw attention to the potential harms of the human exceptionalism embedded in modern social and political thought, and they evoke new philosophical questions that challenge state-anchored professional social work to imagine beyond the traditional scope of our research and practice.
Our guiding questions include:
Please get in touch if you have questions, ideas for collaboration, or if you would like to be added to our SIG email list.
SIG Co-Convenors:
Dr Tina Wilson
Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, Faculty of Arts
The University of British Columbia, Canada
tina.wilson@ubc.ca
Dr Heather Lynch
Professor, MSc (Social Work)
Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland, United Kingdom
heather.lynch@gcu.ac.uk
2026 special issue call for papers: Social work and artificial intelligence: Socio-technical entanglements across knowledge, ethical, and relational domains, Journal of Technology in Human Services.
This year's theme focuses on time as a structuring problem for social work knowledge and practice. Social work inherits from Enlightenment rationalism a commitment to linear, progressive time. That is, the conviction that principled human action improves lives, measurably, over a forward-moving horizon. That temporal frame is not neutral because it ranks people by their capacity to improve and generates sorting categories when they cannot, as social work's record of serious historical and ongoing harms documents.
Our focus this year is on what happens when this temporal frame is contested. Contemporary physics, Indigenous, feminist new materialism, queer and crip scholarship, and more-than-human thought have each argued, on different grounds, that linear time is neither inevitable nor universal. Multiple, non-synchronous temporalities are the condition of social life, not its deviation. This creates a genuine problem for social work as improvement claims have been the justification for intervention, and dismantling the temporal assumptions beneath them does not automatically supply an alternative ground for our work.
Through our monthly reading group and annual pre-conference event at ECSWR 2027, we will consider time not as the backdrop of social work activity but as one of its central instruments, asking what practices, relations, and forms of knowledge become possible when we stop taking chronological time as given.
- In collaboration with the Social Work Research on Digitization and Technology SIG, co-convened by Judit Castellví-Majó, Samuel Salovaara, and Jana Verplancke.
Forthcoming: Journal of Technology in Human Services special issue on social work and artificial intelligence
- Collaboration with the Social Work Ethics Research Group (SWRG) SIG
Forthcoming 2026: Ethics & Social Welfare special issue on more-than-human ethical issues for social work
ECSWR 2024 SIG Event presentations
ECSWR 2023 SIG Event presentations (note: video quality is poor)
