Stephen Cowden

The ‘User’: Friend, foe or fetish?: A critical exploration of user involvement in health and social care

‘User Involvement’ has become the new mantra in Public Services with professionals constantly being reminded that ‘user knows best’. The pur pose of this paper is to ask where the preoccupation with ‘the User’ comes from and to pose some questions about what ‘User Involvement’ actually means. Within our paper we see three issues as central within this. The first is a consideration of the historical antecedents of the discourse of ‘User Involvement’, focusing in on the struggles over British welfare that took place around the late 1970s–early 1980s. This forms the context from which we seek to understand and critique the New Labour project in relation to the massive expansion of regulatory frame works. We argue that, far from enabling the delivery of high quality integrated services that truly reflect the interests of current and future users, these policies represent the further commodification of basic human needs and welfare. Finally, it has become apparent the current ‘User’ discourse has assumed contradictory manifestations, in particular the emergence of groupings of ‘professional users’ who participate in the formation of state policy as ‘expert consultants’. We conclude by arguing for an approach in which user perspectives are neither privileged nor subjugated, but are situated in a process of creative critical dialogue with professionals, which is linked to the development of a concept of welfare driven by emancipatory rather than regulatory imperatives.

The social worker as intellectual

This paper examines the state of intellectual activity within social work under the conditions of neo-liberalism. It is motivated by concern with the demise of what previously was termed ‘bottom-up’ social work and a growing sense of despair amongst front line social workers regarding their capacity to engage with users, citizens and communities in ways other than those determined by managerial and regulatory mechanisms. This leads us into a discussion about the possibilities of what it might mean for social workers to think of themselves as ‘intellectuals’. It considers the different meanings of the term ‘intellectual’ and argues that social work has much to gain from the tradition which has identified new kinds of public sector professionals as ‘transformative intellectuals’.

Multiculturalism’s new fault lines: Religious fundamentalisms and public policy

This paper seeks to critically examine the emergence of contemporary religious fundamentalisms and how they have been able to acquire influence in a way that has opened new ‘fault lines’ within multiculturalist public policy discourse. Specifically, the paper is interested in understanding the curiously paradoxical place of religion and faith based groupings in the contemporary multicultural polity, and the confusion, and in some instances conflicts, this has caused amongst the Left. This is illustrated through an extended examination of the Shabina Begum case concerning a Muslim schoolgirl and her demands to wear the jilbab, a specific religious headscarf, to school. It is argued that, in part, these ideological fault lines have resulted from an uncritical embrace by some progressives of ideas associated with postmodernist thinking; in particular the uncritical assertion of virtues of anti-universalism and cultural relativism. This then leaves an urgent task for progressives to think through some alternatives based on a re-articulation of a new political discourse of egalitarianism which is unashamedly universalist and secular.

Community cohesion, communitarianism and neoliberalism:

Policy discourse around ‘community cohesion’ has displaced liberal multiculturalist and anti-racist approaches with a much narrower focus on the promotion of ‘British values’ and, for minority communities, through a ‘faith’ agenda. We argue that these developments derive from the predominance of the doctrine of communitarianism within the contemporary policy terrain, influencing both New Labour and the Conservatives. The convergence of this with neoliberal social and economic imperatives has created a discourse of ‘conditional citizenship’ for Muslim communities particularly. There is a major policy contradiction where faith based approaches are promoted on one hand, but, in the context of transnational Islamist terror, lead to whole Muslim communities being pathologised as ‘insufficiently British’ on the other. We discuss the ‘Trojan Horse schools’ affair in Birmingham in 2014 as an example of this. We conclude in calling for an urgent refocussing of the debate toward secular approaches in policy, alongside looking at the specific economic and social conditions that we argue are the root cause of breakdowns in community cohesion.

Part two Response to Tariq Modood – Accommodating religions: Who’s accommodating whom?

A key intention of our original paper was to open up a discussion about the increasing influence that religious groups are having on social policy in the UK. In this regard, we very much welcome Professor Tariq Modood’s response and contribution to the debate on ‘multiculturalism’s new fault lines’. The concern we expressed in our original argument focused on the increasing accommodation of religion within state multiculturalism in both general terms, and also in the case of particular substantive demands that were being accommodated. In doing so we argued that this represented a dangerously uncritical attitude to the growing influence of religious absolutism and fundamentalism, particularly in the UK and also further afield. Professor Modood has responded to this by characterizing our position as a form of ‘radical secularism’ and thereby implying that we want to exclude altogether the contribution to the public sphere of people who are inspired by religion. For him the affirmation of religious identities is essentially an expression of ‘ethnic minority self-assertions, mobilizations and political claims-making’, a new and important manifestation of ‘multicultural citizenship’. Accordingly, within a framework of classic liberal multiculturalism, the policy challenge then becomes one of seeking out ways to extend citizen

Critical Pedagogy: Critical Thinking as a Social Practice

Much of the literature on critical thinking focuses on the ways in which human beings develop the capacity, through complex cognitive processes and skills, to evaluate or make sense of information. Within the formal educational context, it is often associated with pedagogical strategies aimed toward nurturing and developing learners’ capacity for logical enquiry and reasoning. Though such insights are clearly very important, a narrow focus on what might be termed the “science of learning” can result in a negation of an obvious but very important point, namely, to what end and for what purpose should we be seeking to nurture critical thinking. Put another way, what is the moral, ethical, and political dimension of learning to think critically? And it is this question that forms the main purpose of the present chapter. By invoking the idea of critical thinking as a social practice, we examine the educational approach known as critical pedagogy and consider its relevance to higher education today. Critical pedagogy in its broadest sense is an educational philosophy that seeks to connect forms of education to wider political questions by arguing that processes or acts of learning and knowing are themselves inherently political.