Narrative Social Work Practice

This book highlights the co-creation of the narrative interview and explains how the narrative method can be used to promote competence and wellness, resist oppression, and ultimately liberate clients from their problems. The person-in-environment concept brings together a wide range of personal and societal micro to macro influences that allow practitioners to engage in an effective helping process with diverse individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities.

The textbook has been written at a time of pronounced sociocultural and historical flux, uncertainty, and civil strife that threaten to disrupt the social fabric of the United States. Consequently, the book augments the resilience-enhancing stress model (RESM) approach to the narrative methodology. Each chapter of the text describes a client or constituency undergoing a life transition and the associated risks (stressors) and protective factors surrounding them. Among the topics covered are:

Adopting RESM Anti-Oppressive Social Work Strategies: A Micro to Macro Approach
Co-creating a Narrative: Forming Personal Identity
Macrolevel Narrative Skills and Techniques
Proactive Resilience Social Work Practice
Time, Place, and Resilience

The ultimate purpose of the book is for social workers to develop the ability to enhance clients' and constituencies' optimal resilient social functioning in a just and equitable world that embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion. Although narrative social work practice is not yet widely applied, the text elucidates how storytelling can break new ground in achieving asset-based, resilience-enhancing social work practice as well as redress social, economic, and political injustice.

Narrative Social Work Practice: A Resilience-Enhancing Anti-Oppressive Approach is the third in a series of texts that defines risk and resilience theory and its offshoot—the RESM. The book is intended primarily for generalists and advanced students as well as practitioners in the social work field.