Announcing Our 2019-2020 Social Work Catalog

Letter from the editor:

I am pleased to share the 2019-2020 Columbia University Press social work catalog. If I were to pick a theme tying these books together, it would be “social work in an anxious age.” In politically precarious times, when social workers are renewing their commitments to the most vulnerable among us—the immigrant, the refugee, the young inner-city adult, the nonbinary adolescent—I’m pleased to offer a few books that might guide the way.

In Queer Social Work, Tyler M. Argüello has collected clinical cases from around the country to build a framework for LGBTQ+ affirmative practice. On the other side of the intake interview, a new anthology from Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane, Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity, showcases the lived experience of genderqueer and nonbinary people of all walks of life. Life for young adults—especially the marginalized youth in America’s cities—is often full of trauma. In Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents, Mery F. Diaz and Benjamin Shepard consider the stories we tell about the lives and experiences of children and adolescents and propose counternarratives that challenge dominant ideas about childhood and show us how to center the practice around the young client’s story. Speaking of counternarratives, in America the Beautiful and Violent, Dexter R. Voisin provides a compelling and social justice–oriented analysis of current trends in neighborhood violence in light of the historical and structural factors that have reproduced entrenched patterns of racial and economic inequality. And, in the second edition of their landmark text, Trauma: Contemporary Directions in Trauma Theory, Research, and Practice, Shoshana Ringel and Jerrold R. Brandell survey the theoretical and clinical issues and the latest research in trauma theory and its clinical applications.

In many ways, social workers live on the front lines of the debates over immigration. In the second edition of Best Practices for Social Work with Immigrants and Refugees, Miriam Potocky and Mitra Naseh update this comprehensive guide to social work with foreign-born clients, evaluating different helping strategies and their methodological strengths and weaknesses.

But for those who attend CSWE, all of this work begins in the classroom. I’m proud to debut two new texts for the modern social work teacher. The first is, Amy Batchelor’s Statistics in Social Work, a concise and approachable introduction that limits its coverage to the concepts most relevant to evidence-based and rigorous social work practice. The second is Ken Moffatt’s Postmodern Social Work, which examines how social workers adapt to our era of widespread instability, uncertainty, and precarity. Moffatt turns to postmodern philosophy’s grappling with late capitalism and the omnipresence of technology to develop a new approach to reflective social work practice and critical pedagogy.

I hope my enthusiasm for these books comes through—I am proud to have published them. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions or ideas for other books that can join their ranks.

Sincerely,
Stephen Wesley, Editor, Social Work