Anke van den Dries PhD Candidate

Anke is a social worker and coach/supervisor for social professionals and has specialized in social work with sex workers. Although often rewarding, this work also regularly left her feeling tired, angry and powerless. As a practitioner Anke experienced how demands of social work organizations and state-set frameworks do not concur with the needs of marginalized or underprivileged communities. This can bring social workers and community workers in an acrobatic split. Anke sees colleagues finding several overt or more covert ways to deal with these difficulties, where the final coping strategy of the individual practitioner seems to be quitting the profession altogether.  

For this PhD research, Anke is interested in what social justice means to these practitioners, and how this relates to their ideas of ‘good work'. What do they encounter when working on social justice and politicizing practices, and how does this impact them (as practitioners, as part of a professional community, as citizens, as human beings)? Finally, can we collectively find ways to strengthen these practices?