Call for book chapter proposals!
The Sounds of Silence: Social Work, Power, and Racialised Class Formation in the Nordic Welfare States
Due: 30 September 2026
Send to: adrian.groglopo@socwork.gu.se
Social work in the Nordic countries is often portrayed through ideals of equality, universalism, and social progress. However, this history is also marked by silences—systematic omissions that shape what can be recognised as social problems, whose suffering becomes legible, and which forms of inequality remain unaddressed. These silences are neither accidental nor neutral. They are historically produced and embedded in the development of welfare states, professional norms, and regulatory regimes that organise class inequality, racialisation, and gendered governance, understood as the regulation of labour, care, family life, and social reproduction through differentiated and racialised expectations, as well as broader geopolitical positioning.
This call invites critical contributions that place silence at the centre of analysis, exploring how social work—as a research field, professional practice, educational formation, and institutional system—has been shaped by what remains unspoken. Silence is understood not as absence, ethical restraint, or professional neutrality, but as an active social and political practice that sustains relations of power. Particular attention is directed towards silences related to racialised class domination, labour organisation, the racialised and gendered division of welfare, labour markets, family regulation, and the material foundations of inequality within Nordic welfare societies.
Historically, Nordic welfare states have relied on class arrangements tied to labour markets, social reproduction, and national belonging. While often portrayed as egalitarian, these arrangements have masked persistent class hierarchies and unequal power dynamics. They were neither racially neutral nor gender-blind. The formation of a national working class was intertwined with racialised distinctions between those considered fully part of society and those marginalised, disposable, or conditionally included. Social work has played a crucial role in this process—controlling access to welfare, managing dependency, and overseeing the lives of a racialised and gendered working class, often by remaining silent about exploitation, dispossession, and class domination.
From racial science and eugenic social policies to the long-term governance of Sámi and Romani peoples; from the regulation of religious and ethnic minorities to contemporary migration, asylum regimes, and securitisation politics that condition diverse communities and migrants, social work has been implicated in the racialised ordering of class relations and social vulnerability. At the same time, global conflicts, forced displacement, and geopolitical realignments have reshaped labour markets, welfare policies, and professional practices in the Nordic countries. Silence has served to disconnect welfare from imperialist wars, class inequality from global capitalism, and social work from the international production of displacement and precarity.
In recent decades, increasing inequality and welfare reforms have reconfigured social work within Westernised regimes of governance that combine caring with heightened social control. Under conditions characterised by contingency, activation, securitisation, and moral regulation, social work has increasingly been tasked with managing racialised class inequalities while maintaining the appearance of support and neutrality. These developments have been further amplified by the rise of far-right political influence in Sweden and across the Western world, which has normalised exclusionary ideas of belonging, punitive welfare policies, and racialised hierarchies of deservingness. Consequently, the segmentation of labour, access to welfare, and family life along racialised and gendered lines has intensified, while issues of class power, structural domination, and political accountability are displaced or left unspoken. Silence has played a key role in this process, allowing social work to function as a tool of governance that simultaneously supports populations in crisis and regulates them according to prevailing norms of productivity, citizenship, and social order under increasingly authoritarian conditions.
Relevant themes include, but are not limited to:
Silence as a technology of power in social work research, policy, and practice
Class inequality, class power, and the political economy of Nordic welfare states
Racialised and gendered working-class formations and welfare segmentation
Social work, labour markets, and the governance of poverty, precarity, and surplus populations
Gendered governance of care, family life, and social reproduction in racialised contexts
The positioning of diverse communities within welfare institutions
Migration, asylum, and humanitarian governance in contexts shaped by war and conflict
Far-right political influence and the restructuring of welfare, anti-gender and social regulation
Professional neutrality, ethics, and epistemic injustice
On hegemonic and counter-hegemonic pedagogies in social work education and the social work profession
Resistance, counter-knowledges, and the contestation of institutional silence
Interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches are strongly encouraged. Contributions may draw on political economy, critical social work, abolitionist perspectives, sociology, history, critical race and gender studies, decolonial and postcolonial theory, historical materialism, critical geopolitics, anthropology, law, or related disciplines. A wide range of methodologies are welcome, including archival research, policy analysis, ethnography, discourse analysis, comparative and transnational approaches, participatory or activist research, and critical theoretical interventions.
The edited volume is intended for submission to an international scholarly publishing house. We welcome historically grounded, theoretically rigorous, and empirically informed contributions that critically engage with social work in the Nordic context. We particularly encourage submissions that go beyond celebratory welfare narratives and explore how silence upholds class power, racialised and gendered inequalities, and regimes of regulation across research, practice, professionalism, and geopolitical entanglements.
Abstracts should be 500–700 words and clearly articulate the proposed chapter’s:
central research question and/or core argument,
theoretical framework and key concepts,
empirical material and/or methodological approach (where applicable),
contribution to the volume’s focus on silence as a constitutive relation of power in social work.
Each submission should include:
Title of the proposed chapter
Abstract (500–700 words)
Author name(s) and institutional affiliation(s)
A short biographical note (100–150 words)
The deadline for abstract submission is 30 September 2026. Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit full chapter manuscripts of 5,000–7,000 words (excluding references) by 30 January 2027. Chapters will then be peer reviewed.
Editors: Adrián Groglopo, PhD, Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Kris Clarke, PhD, Department of Social Work, University of Helsinki, Finland.