The Social Work and the More-than-human Special Interest Group (MTH SIG) brings together transnational scholars working on the ways in which the more-than-human, broadly defined, challenges human-focused social work research, education and practice. In different ways the Covid-19 pandemic, environmental emergency and human-made technologies each generate political and economic instabilities that amplify existing inequalities between humans, but also between humans and non-human life. These events and phenomena draw attention to the potential harms of the human exceptionalism embedded in modern social and political thought, and they evoke new philosophical questions that challenge state-anchored professional social work to imagine beyond the traditional scope of our research and practice.
Our guiding questions include:
Please get in touch if you have questions, ideas for collaboration, or if you would like to be added to our SIG email list.
SIG Co-Convenors:
Dr Tina Wilson
Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, Faculty of Arts
The University of British Columbia, Canada
tina.wilson@ubc.ca
Dr Heather Lynch
Professor, MSc (Social Work) Programme Lead
Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland, United Kingdom
heather.lynch@gcu.ac.uk
2025/2026 Theme: Technology and "the Social"
In collaboration with the Social Work Research on Digitization and Technology SIG, co-convened by Judit Castellví-Majó, Samuel Salovaara, and Jana Verplancke.
The pace of technological development is impacting all aspects of human life. The internet now dominates globalised communications, and social media shapes culture, business and politics. Large language models of artificial intelligence are making swift inroads into business and education, and, depending on your viewpoint, threaten or promise a 5th industrial revolution. This, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, will be more impactful than electricity.
Technological developments since the Oldowan choppers of the Paleolithic age are a more-than-human production that extends, adapts and changes the human form. The changes brought about by AI on what it means to be human are profound, as the human becomes transhuman (More, 2013). AI is already enhancing medical research and screening, improving efficiency in a wide range of industries and aiding scientific discovery. At the same time, the downside impacts are worrying and at times terrifying. Job displacement, widening inequality, social manipulation, algorithmic bias, misinformation, and deepfakes, as well as data privacy risks, security threats, erosion of skills, psychological harm, and diminished human interaction, are just some of the risks presented by Google’s Intelligence Search. This feels like a threshold moment as artificial intelligence is with us, yet the extent and ways in which it will shape human life depend on how this technological force is managed.
There is a strong seam of more-than-human scholarship since George Canguilhem’s insight into the relationship between human development and environment (Canguilhem, 2008) and Gilbert Simondon’s (Scott, 2014) life of technical objects challenging the human/machine binary. Through her allegory of OncoMouse Donna Haraway (Haraway, 1997) argues that technology and capitalism have and are implicated in how human life is shaped and how it relates to the environments that produced it. These voices offer a critical vantage point on questions of equality, discrimination and what it means to relate that are key to social work practice. By bringing together work interrogating developments in AI with more-than-human thought, this SIG collaboration aims to contribute to emergent social work scholarship in this field.
Our work is organized around two main activities: a monthly reading group and ECSWR 2026 conference SIG events. The latter is anticipated to include a collaborative morning event followed by two solo SIG sessions in the afternoon. All are welcome. Email Tina if you'd like to be added to the reading group email list.
2024/2025 Theme: More-Than-Human Ethics for Social Work
- Collaboration with the Social Work Ethics Research Group (SWRG) SIG
Forthcoming 2026: Ethics & Social Welfare special issue on more-than-human ethical issues for social work
2023/2024 Theme: Social Work Geographies, Or, The Place/s Of Social Work
ECSWR 2024 SIG Event presentations
2022/2023 Theme: Michel Serres The Natural Contract: “What language do the things of the world speak, that we might come to an understanding with them, contractually?”
ECSWR 2023 SIG Event presentations (note: video quality is poor)
