Members

Skye Loneragan

Skye is a writer/performer and interdisciplinary researcher whose work has included a focus on waiting spaces (through creative engagement, the poet and poetry in queues), ethnographic work in areas of maternal mental health and sisterhood, and digging into ways that curiosity can function as a kind of currency (both in terms of value and exchange) in public engagement. She is exploring nano-plastics in day to day lives at present, and is interested in creative methodologies in intra-active worlds within the context of eco-emergency.

PhD - How are we becoming what we are trying to throw away?

Critical zones waste in the age of a Plantationocene and Plasticene is a huge conundrum unequally distributed across the planet, and single-use plastic food packaging in particular is an accumulating part of eco-emergency, with its associated ideas of disposability. Humans have the strange distinction of being both the source of plastic and its sink (Adkins 2018), so how are we becoming what it is we are trying to throw away in more-than-human worlds? In the context of a global pandemic where we are clearly connected by what we cannot see with the naked eye (a virus we must use our imagination to mitigate against), this research explores other invisible ways we are connected that also require our imagination through a study of nano-plastics in everyday life. Taking a field philosophy approach to articulated relationships to ‘rubbish’ in the home through creative engagement, this study is inspired by both Haraway’s ideas of string figuring and Baradian ideas of inseparability and diffraction and the theoretical framework of agential realism.

Heather Lynch

Heather Lynch is a lecturer in social work at Glasgow Caledonian University UK. She is interested in questions around the politics of life, and in particular how life is expressed through multispecies communities. Her work traverses biopolitical theory, continental philosophy and environmental humanities. Her empirical work builds on contemporary practices of field philosophy as she seeks to articulate problems that de-centre the ‘human’.  She is co-editor of a recent special edition of the European Journal of Social Theory on “affirmative biopolitics”. She has written for various journals and edited volumes on topics such as ethics in criminal justice (Ethics and Welfare), policy and desire (British Journal of Sociology of Education) and the politics of digital story telling (International Journal of Visual Methods).

Stephen Webb

Stephen A. Webbis Professor of Social Work and Assistant Vice Principal of Community and Public Engagement at Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland. He previously worked as Research Professor at University of Newcastle, Australia and University of Sussex. Stephen is author of Social Work in a Risk Society (2006, Palgrave), and co-author/editor of The New Politics of Social Work, (2013, Palgrave); Evidence-based Social Work: A Critical Stance (2009, Routledge); Ethics and Value Perspectives in Social Work (2010, Palgrave); Social Work Theories and Methods (2012, Sage, second edition, translated into Korean and Polish); The SAGE Handbook of Social Work; (2012, Sage); the major international reference work International Social Work (2010, 4 Volumes, Sage); and Information and Communication Technology in the Welfare Services (2003, Jessica Kingsley Publishers). He has recently finished editing the Routledge Handbook of Critical Social Work a major international reference work.

His inter-disciplinary research interests focus on theorising the future of social work. For this he draws on Actor Network Theory, material sociology, theories of ideology and critical and feminist theory. He has recently published on Derrida, Barad, Esposito and Foucault drawing out the significance of post materialist paradigm change for social work with a focus on emerging geopolitical critiques of human exceptionalism, the importance of the more-than-human turn. He is editing a new 52-chapter Routledge Handbook of International Critical Social Work: New Perspectives and Agendas which examines wildcards and future horizons for social work, while highlighting the important of the Global south and Latin America in emerging debates about theory crafting for a different social work future.

Tina E. Wilson

I live in southern Ontario, Canada, on the traditional territory shared between the Haudenosaunee confederacy and the Anishinaabe nations. My research interests revolve around the history and philosophy of professional social work in welfare state contexts, generational aspects of perceptions of the possible and the desirable, and related developments in critical social theories and worldmaking practices. My SSHRC-funded postdoctoral research considers the environment and social work.