Marina Richter, Martin Böhnel and Julia Emprechtinger (2025)
1 Introduction
When we wrote the call for contributions for this thematic dossier, we were excited about the perspectives that opened when thinking with and through post-human concepts. We experienced this in our own research on “Social work in Swiss Prisons”.1 In this project, we conceptualised prisons and social work as a profession within the prison in post-human terms, transforming our understanding of what social work can be and what is entangled within its practices.
Social work as a practice centred on the interaction of professionals with
service users moved radically to a notion of an assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) that also includes the non-human: materialities such as office spaces, computers and numerous digital and paper files, as well as often overlooked items such as notebooks, pencils or screens. Social work practice is also entangled with immaterial elements, including atmospheres, affects and emotions.
At the same time, while conducting our research, we also felt that the
debate in social work, and in particular in Switzerland, was rather reserved in taking up our invitation to think about professional practice and the discipline from a novel onto-epistemological (Barad, 2007) perspective. The call was therefore meant to open a space for exploration and critical discussion around theoretical and empirical questions related to researching social work in post-human terms. Unfortunately, our enthusiasm did not resonate as we expected, and we only received very few signs of interest. At the end, only two articles have made it into the thematic issue, one being our own contribution.
Therefore, this introduction serves a dual purpose. On the one hand,
it will provide a framework and a reflection on the two articles in the thematic issue. On the other hand, the question remains why there were not more contributions and what this means for social work and its involvement with post-human thinking. The theoretical debates around post-humanism, new materialism, more-than-human theories, science and technology studies or feminist studies are not new and are readily taken up in the social sciences, such as geography,
social anthropology or sociology. As social work research draws much inspiration from other social sciences, the question remains: why has post- human thinking—to use post-human as an umbrella term for the broader debate—not gained more recognition in social work research?
In this introduction, there is a need to lay the ground by providing a picture of existing contributions in social work research that draw on post-human thinking. With an international perspective, there is a body of literature worth examining that provides inspiration for theoretical and empirical research and seeks to bridge research and theory to the professional field of social work practice. Second, as both contributions represent very different perspectives on post-human research, they also offer clues to why it seems so hard to think in post-human terms in social work research, or, put differently, why it seems inadequate to frame social work research in post-human terms. The article by Alexander Brunner provides a critical assessment of the usefulness and theoretical aptitude of post-human thinking for social work research. The article by Martin Böhnel, Julia Emprechtinger and Marina Richter presents an empirical exploration of atmospheres as immaterial “things” that emerge from human and non-human entanglements in the context of social work in prisons. Finally, the last section focuses on the difficulty of adventuring into post-human thinking when conducting research in and on social work.
2 Debates on Social Work and Post-Humanism
Although impulses from post-human, new materialist and other theoretical debates that developed from post-structuralist thinking—often grounded in Deleuzian philosophy, feminism or science and technology studies (STS)—are not new to social work research, the debate remains scattered. A cornerstone in this debate was definitely the edited volume by Vivienne Bozalek and Bob Pease, Post-Anthropocentric Social Work, published in 2021. In this book, the different authors draw on major insights from various “post”-theories to critically assess research, theory-building and practice in social work. They address the problematic notion of the centrality of “man” in humanist thought and argue that this anthropocentrism remains prevalent in social work thinking. “What is less acknowledged in social work, however, is how the dominant understanding of humanism is predicated on an individualist and western concept of ‘man’ and also disconnects humans from the natural environment” (Bozalek & Pease, 2021, p. 34).
From this initial movement of decentring the human in thinking about social work and what it means to think beyond the human in social work (Webb, 2021a), several other topics are developed throughout the book. One important strand
of inspiration draws on feminist and eco-feminist thinking. Conceptualising social work in the Anthropocene requires thinking of social problems as related to ecologies, materialities and planetary dimensions (Noble, 2021). Another important source of inspiration comes from indigenous perspectives. The argument goes beyond questioning the historical implications of colonial foundations of social work. Rather, indigenous perspectives are included as inspiration for thinking about our world and our relations with and in the world in alternative cosmologies (Woods & Hölscher, 2021).
The debate has taken hold and grown, particularly in edited volumes such as The Body Politics of Glocal Social Work: Essays on the Post-Anthropocentric Condition (Livholts, 2023) or The Routledge Handbook of International Critical Social Work: New Perspectives and Agendas (Webb, 2023). The first uses creative writing as a form to explore body politics and the entanglement of social work with materiality. As the author notes, “each post-anthropocentric essay has been written as an offer to the reader to re-think what social work can become, suggesting that glocality, a fusion of local and global, marks a future condition that paves the way for a post-anthropocentric worldview” (p. 2). The latter focuses on critical social work and includes a section on post-humanism, pandemics and the environment. Post-humanism as a theoretical perspective to inform social work thinking and practice, as well as social work becoming increasingly entangled with questions of the environment and environmental justice. Both are acknowledged as important contributions to critical thinking in social work.
That post-humanism has become a source of inspiration for researchers in and on social work is also evident on the institutional side in networks such as the special interest group (SIG) Social Work and the More-than-Human of the European Social Work Research Association. The SIG has, for instance, edited a special issue to be published in 2026 in the journal Ethics & Social Welfare on more-than-human ethics in social work.
From our point of view, post-human theories are less about offering solutions for current crises and even less about proposing a new order. They rather offer alternative and, given the entanglement between humans, animals and nature, contemporary perspectives for conceptualising the world we live in. In this sense, they invite to conduct research and conceive professional practice differently. The debates are, therefore, inspiring but far from homogeneous. Although this can be seen as problematic, it can also be an invitation to explore and seek new paths to enlarge our ways of knowing, of engaging with the world and of communicating about the world. We have identified two conceptual cornerstones of post-humanist thinking that we believe have the potential to inspire
social work research and practice in the future: Barad’s theory of agential realism and care ethics as developed by Tronto and later by Puig de la Bellacasa.
2.1 Agential Realism
Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism (Barad, 2007) draws on Niels Bohr’s philosophy of physics, which was influential for quantum theory. She explores how quantum physics not only expanded physics into the infinitesimally small world of quantum particles but also profoundly changed the epistemology of physical experimental research. In an experiment, Bohr imagined—it was later realised in laboratory conditions—that light behaved according to the conditions of the experiment. If the setting was designed to show the particle nature of light, it produced a scatter pattern on the screen that testifies to that nature. But if the setting was designed to show the wave-like nature of light, then there would be an interference pattern, as with waves. In short, Bohr’s conclusion was that the testing is never independent from the apparatus, and thus “we are part of the nature we seek to understand” (Barad, 2007, p. 67).
Being part of the world we seek to understand is what Barad conceptualises as entanglement. This means that what we would, in the humanist tradition, separate into subjects (humans) and objects (non-humans, materialities, “things”), giving the former the power of action and the latter the effect of being acted upon, is related in and through this specific situation. Relatedness is therefore constitutive for such entanglements. Reality becomes something that is not there to be researched or acted upon, but rather it is made of the relations between different things. As Barad states, “reality is not composed of things-inthemselves or things-behind-phenomena but things-in-phenomena” (Barad, 2003, p. 817). The elements of such an entanglement are related through separation, conceptualised as cutting-together-apart (Barad, 2014, p. 176). Neither the entanglements are unities nor the elements; rather, the elements together produce through their relatedness the entanglement. This also means that differences between elements are not erased, “on the contrary, entangling entails differentiatings, differentiatings entail entanglings” (Barad, 2003, p. 817).
For social work, this could open a path to thinking beyond humanist notions of agency, subjectivity and planning (see also the in-a-nutshell introductions by Bozalek, 2023; Webb, 2021a, 2021b). The relationship between the beneficiary and the professional would have to be reframed (Richter, 2023). “Case work notes, risk assessments and support plans would have to be rewritten” (Webb, 2021a, p. 64). If we conceive of beneficiaries and professionals entangled in counselling and co-constructing the case, we acknowledge that the work
performed emerges from the specific entanglement. We further acknowledge that beneficiaries and professionals cannot be separated in this process and that both are cut-together-apart in making the situation and its possible developments emerge. This also has a profound impact on the underlying notion of planning in social work. “Fields of entanglement also provide a point of critique for social work’s emphasis on linearity and planning. Social work is bound up with idea of directionality” (Webb, 2021b, p. 22). And, most importantly, social work is grounded in the notion that individuals are responsible for their situation and for possible paths to a better future. Imagining subjects not as individuals but as entangled with professionals in the sense of making kin—to borrow the notion from Donna Haraway (Haraway, 2016)—underscores the potential of a relational perspective (Ife, 2021).
2.2 Care Ethics
Care ethics are not new to social work research and practice. At the same time, the debate about care ethics has developed and grown in light of post-human theoretical thinking. When Fisher and Tronto proposed in 1990 a definition of care, they stated that care is “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40). There are many threads we can untangle from this definitional web that link to post-human thinking. These threads extend the definition beyond a narrow view of care that limits it to often unpaid female work within the family.
A first thread extends care to a species activity that addresses humans as one among many species and that underlines our being with this world, rather than in it. “Nothing comes without its world” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012, p. 197), and therefore it is important, if we want to care, to care not only about humans but also about the world, including all the human and more-than-human, material and immaterial “things” that make this world. Care becomes a material activity, and matter becomes a matter of care, as Puig de la Bellacasa argues (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Care is then not reduced to a moral stance; rather, it is a practical activity as “it involves affective, ethical, and hands-on agencies of practical and material consequence“ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 4). At the same time, and this could be a second thread, care is about trying, about doing “as well as possible”. It does not imply a moral imperative or an absolute stance; it is about giving space to maintain and repair our world and letting potentialities emerge to provide a liveable world for all of us. The last thread is about relating,
about interweaving to make this world a “life-sustaining web”. The relationality of this world is both the source and the resource for our caring activities, and it is, at the same time, the entanglement we need to care about.
Social work research has found inspiration in such an understanding of care. Bozalek and Hölscher take a multispecies encounter as a starting point to propose “becoming octopus” to increase our awareness and connectedness to and of the world. “A highly attentive creature, octopuses use their sensory capacities to deeply attune to their surrounds” (Bozalek & Hӧlscher, 2023, p. 1). The authors show how social work ethics could be reconfigured as a way of sensing that goes beyond subject/object and that relates to curiosity, attentiveness and response-ability. In an article on post-human care ethics in prison social work, we have woven together care ethics with Barad’s notion of the agential cut (Emprechtinger & Richter, 2025). We have argued for a perspective on relationality and transformativity in the context of prison social work that allows for the co-construction of unforeseen paths for incarcerated people.
3 Contributions to the Thematic Dossier
Against the backdrop of these two cornerstones of post-humanist thinking, and while showing how social work research and practice could be inspired by them, let us turn to the articles that make up this thematic dossier. The first article published engages in a critical discussion of post-human theoretical perspectives as they are debated in German-speaking academia. Alexander Brunner paints a multifaceted picture of the richness of post-human thinking and underlines also the playfulness of many texts. As he writes, the debates create a sound and an atmosphere of theory that evokes becoming, flowing, movement, the crossing and blurring of boundaries, and the flourishing and liveliness of the vibrant matter—to borrow the term from Bennet (Bennett, 2010; Brunner, 2025, p. 2). At the same time, he takes a critical stance from the beginning and discusses possible shortcomings of post-human theory. For example, he points out that post-human thinkers argue against essentialising categories such as “man” vs. “woman” and critically states that, when using categories such as human vs. non-human, a new essentialising movement arises.
He deepens his critical understanding of post-human thinking in several aspects. First, he explores the enlargement of the social to include morethan-human elements. This allows a new focus on the relation between humans and the world (the German term Mensch-Umwelt-Beziehung is hard to translate) and opens perspectives for eco-social work. Second, he underlines the importance of decentring the human in ethical terms, as it seems more than necessary to take care of the world to take care of humans. Finally, there is the
creative search and production of alternative stories as practiced by Haraway (2016). Such fabulation produces new alternative utopias to the current dominant technofix, which does not seem to offer hopeful answers for a future in this damaged world.
Throughout the text, he points out where he sees inspiration for social work research and practice. To take up the last element discussed, the fabulation of Haraway, he imagines how creating stories could be a practice for social work. Creating stories together, imagining the becoming of new, alternative, creative and speculative futures, could be a playful yet powerful method of social work practice.
The second article takes a very different approach, using post-human thinking to make sense of empirical material. Martin Böhnel, Julia Emprechtinger and Marina Richter discuss the notions of trust and mistrust in the context of Swiss prisons and relate them to events with social workers in the prisons (Böhnel et al., 2025). They take their entanglement as researchers as the starting point for their reading of the materials. It is their feeling of trust in certain situations that makes them wonder how trust can emerge in a context where mistrust is rather the institutional rule. It is therefore their feeling as researchers that leads them to take a closer look at these moments.
When focusing on these moments, they evoke the feeling that trust was “in the air” (Turner et al., 2022). They therefore turn to atmospheres as something tangible while elusive. Atmospheres are conceptualised in post-human terms as assemblages, as an entanglement that emerges from various things coming together and affecting each other: the social worker, the incarcerated person, the researcher, the social worker’s office and the smell of coffee. The atmosphere envelopes people, affects them, and, for instance, with the smell of coffee, they start to relax in the social worker’s office.
The article shows that trust, particularly as an assemblage, is more than a grounding principle for relational work between a social worker and a service user. The notion of entanglement implies that it is not humans alone who create these atmospheres, or even social workers alone; rather, a range of “things” come together to create them. Then, when an atmosphere of trust unfolds and affects the people it englobes, potentialities can unfold. Such moments of trust become moments of flourishing (Bozalek, 2019).
4 Why Is It So Hard to Take a Post-Human Perspective in Social Work Research?
The two articles published in this thematic issue engage with post-human thinking in social work in very different ways and provide fruitful insights into theoretical considerations and onto-epistemological inquiry. At the same time,
the question remains why we received so few articles. Why is a theoretical development that has found wide resonance in other disciplines so scarcely acknowledged in social work? Why didn’t we receive more papers that embraced the post-human invitation to explore human and non-human connections, to think with these theoretical concepts and to further social work research and practice?
In the international literature, the debate is gaining ground, but it is never as numerous as in other disciplines. Although there is some social work research referring to “post”-theories more generally, the number of publications referring to post-human theories remains quite limited. In the broader field of “post”-theories, we find, for instance, social work research engaging with postcolonial theories (Clarke et al., 2024; Singh, 2023). There is a debate on decolonising social work that spans across the globe. Voices from or on behalf of indigenous populations bring increasingly alternative cosmologies into social work (Woods & Hölscher, 2021). Such philosophies of life, such as “Buen Vivir” ( Godden, 2021) or “Ubuntu” (Molefe, 2025), are deeply rooted in indigenous ontologies and provide a basis for conceiving social work differently, with and from the point of view of these communities.
Another field of social work that finds much inspiration in “post”-theories is eco-social work. The benefit of thinking beyond humans and conceptualising the relations between humans and non-humans lies at the heart of the problems addressed. It is in relation to what we call nature, with animals, with the soil or with diseases such as the Covid-19 pandemic (Banks et al., 2024; Gonzalez Benson, 2021), that humans are conceived. Relational thinking interlinks the social question with the ecological crisis and requires theoretical thinking rooted in ecofeminism, postcolonialism, and more-than-human theories (Rambaree et al., 2019).
Although there seems to be engagement in social work with theoretical perspectives that are part of the family of post-theories, there still remains reluctance towards the post-human. One reason could be the label itself. Not in vain has Donna Haraway repeatedly stated that she is not post-human but compost. Evoking the compost as fertiliser to which we turn at the end, and which is the source for new life (Haraway, 2016). Even though post-human does not mean anti-human, and many authors address social issues of power, inequality, and justice, the idea persists that post-humanism is not compatible with the foundations of social work. We would say it is compatible in the sense that post- human thinking cares about humans just as it cares about non-humans. It is about finding ways to live in this damaged world (Tsing, 2021).
However, the human is clearly problematised in post-human theory— not the human as human beings, but the human standing for the principles of enlightening humanist thinking. Post-human thinking decentres the human; it takes the human down from the top of creation and places it back among the other species of this planet. The human becomes one of the species living in this world, one among many others. Other pedagogical disciplines, such as teacher education and educational sciences, show a similar picture. They are, as discipline and profession, fundamentally grounded in humanist principles of individuality and personal development and find it difficult to engage with post- human thinking.
Nevertheless, post-human thinking does not question social work principles of justice and help. Moreover, it does not fundamentally question the ethical principles of social work. What it questions is the exclusivity of humans: a Human Rights Declaration that applies to all humans, whereas other species have no internationally ratified rights. It does not question the importance of addressing social problems or of supporting people in achieving their goals and unfolding their potential. However, it questions that social problems are limited to humans and that we can be isolated from the multispecies and more-than-human world we are part of.
Bibliography
Banks, Sarah, Bertotti, Teresa, Cairns, Lynne, Shears, Jane, Shum, Michelle, Sobočan, Ana M., Strom, Kimberly & Úriz, María Jesús (2024). Social work beyond the pandemic: Exploring social work values for a new eco-social world. International
Social Work, 67(4), 890–904. https://doi. org/10.1177/00208728241227062
Barad, Karen (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321
Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
Barad, Karen (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623
Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Böhnel, Martin, Emprechtinger, Julia & Richter, Marina (2025). Atmospheres of trust: Understanding social work in Swiss prisons. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziale Arbeit, 33, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.33058/
szsa.2025.3478
Bozalek, Vivienne (2019). Towards a responseable social work: Diffracting care through justice. In Stephen Marson, Robert McKinney (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of social work ethics and values (pp. 215– 222). Routledge.
Bozalek, Vivienne (2023). Agential realism for social work. In Stephen A. Webb (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of international critical social work: New perspectives and agendas (1st ed., pp. 1–16). Routledge.
Bozalek, Vivienne, Hölscher, Dorothee (2023). Reconfiguring social work ethics with posthuman and post-anthropocentric imaginaries. In Dorothee Hölscher, Richard Hugman, Donna McAuliffe (Eds.), Social work theory and ethics (pp. 1–30). Springer Nature Singapore. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-981-16-3059-0_20-1
Bozalek, Vivienne, Pease, Bob (2021). Towards post-anthropocentric social work. In Vivienne Bozalek, Bob Pease (Eds.), Post-anthropocentric social work (pp. 33–50). Routledge.
Brunner, Alexander (2025). [Dossier 2025] Posthumanismus und Soziale Arbeit. Sympathien und Kritik. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziale Arbeit / Revue Suisse de Travail Social, (33). https://doi.org/10.33058/szsa.2025.2957
Clarke, Kris, Lee-Oliver, Leece & Ranta-Tyrkkö, Satu (Eds.) (2024). Decolonising social work in Finland: Racialisation and practices of care. Policy Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Félix (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
Emprechtinger, Julia, Richter, Marina (2025). Rethinking social work in prison through posthuman care ethics. Ethics and Social Welfare, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2025.2579915
Fisher, Berenice, Tronto, Joan (1990). Toward a feminist theory of caring. In Emily K. Abel, Margeret K. Nelson (Eds.), Circles of care: Work and identity in women’s lives (pp. 35–62). State University of New York Press.
Godden, Naomi Joy (2021). Community work, love and the indigenous worldview of buen vivir in Peru. International Social Work, 64(3), 354–370. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020872820930254
Gonzalez Benson, Odessa (2021). On becoming “essential”: Coronavirus lessons of ontology- from the migrant farmworker and us who consume the fruits of her labor. Qualitative Social Work, 20(1–2), 186–192. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473325020973340 Haraway, Donna (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Ife, Jim (2021). Social work in the Anthropocene. In Jacques Boulet, Linette Hawkins (Eds.), Advances in human services and public health (pp. 241–254). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-6784-5.ch013
Livholts, Mona B. (2023). The body politics of glocal social work: Essays on the post-anthropocentric condition (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003193593
Molefe, Motsamai (2025). Ubuntu and social justice. In Ingrid Robeyns (Ed.), Pluralizing political philosophy (1st ed., pp. 177–200). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191994784.003.0009
Noble, Carolyne (2021). Ecofeminism to feminist materialism: Implications for Anthropocene feminist social work. In Vivienne Bozalek, Bob Pease (Eds.), Post-anthropocentric social work (pp. 145–159). Routledge.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María (2012). ‘Nothing comes without its world’: Thinking with care. The Sociological Review, 60(2),
197–216. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02070.x
Puig de la Bellacasa, María (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
Rambaree, Komalsingh, Powers, Meredith C. F. & Smith, Richard J. (2019). Ecosocial work and social change in community practice. Journal of Community Practice, 27(3–4), 205–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705422.
2019.1660516
Richter, Marina (2023). Critical post‐humanism and social work in the city: About being entangled as researcher and professional. Social Inclusion, 11(3), 210–219. https://doi. org/10.17645/si.v11i3.6786
Singh, Gurnam (2023). Decolonisation, whiteness and anti-racist social work. In Stephen A. Webb (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of international critical social work: New perspectives and agendas (1st ed., pp. 343–357).
Routledge.
Tsing, Anna L. (2021). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
Turner, Jennifer, Moran, Dominique & Jewkes, Yvonne (2022). ‘It’s in the air here’: Atmosphere(s) of incarceration. Incarceration, 3(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/26326663221110788
Webb, Stephen A. (2021a). What comes after the subject? Towards a critical posthumanist social work. In Vvivienne Bozalek, Bob Pease (Eds.), Post-anthropocentric social work (pp. 52–69). Routledge.
Webb, Stephen A. (2021b). Why agential realism matters to social work. British Journal of Social Work, 51(8), 2964–2981. https://doiorg/10.1093/bjsw/bcaa106
Webb, Stephen A. (Ed.). (2023). The Routledge handbook of international critical social work: New perspectives and agendas (1st ed.). Routledge.
Woods, Glenn, Hölscher, Dorothee (2021). Return of the post-human: Developing indigenist perspectives for social work at a time of environmental crisis. In Vivienne Bozalek, Bob Pease (Eds.), Post-anthropocentric social work (p. Chapter 10). Routledge.
Authors
Marina Richter, Research Group CrimSo, HES-SO Valais/Wallis, marina.richter@hevs.ch
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3147-3882
Martin Böhnel, Research Group CrimSo, HES-SO Valais/Wallis, martin.boehnel@hevs.ch
https://orcid.org/0009-0008-9195-2889
Julia Emprechtinger, Research Group CrimSo, HES-SO Valais/Wallis, julia.emprechtinger@hevs.ch
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8656-3861