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Service user involvement and participatory research are central concepts in social work practice and research. Inspired by Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak," this article draws on the poststructural and postcolonial theory to unpack the assumptions about essentialism, representation, and division of labor underlying the concepts of involvement, participation, and voice. The article combines Spivak's theory about the subaltern and Rancière's theory about politics as dissensus to shed light on how the space for authentic service user voice risks being minimized, corrupted, and co-opted. I discuss the challenges arising from this for understanding service user involvement and participatory knowledge production and suggest possible steps toward handling these challenges.

Social workers are frequent participants in social movements that affect social policy. However, social workers may be inadequately prepared for challenging aspects of social movements such as collective protest. This conceptual study critically examines the political dimension of social welfare through a comparative analysis of Norway and the United States. We discuss the dilemmas in political engagement that social workers encounter, followed by suggestions for social workers' response to collective action. Using the example of Black Lives Matter, we explore social work education and framing to prepare social workers for collective protests and offer a framework that provides direction for social work practice. ; publishedVersion

Community-oriented approaches in social work are highlighted in both social work literature and policy documents in post-financial crisis Europe, and in the Nordic welfare states where professionalized bureaucracy, universal benefits and institutionalized social work have been the norm. The aim of this article is to explore social workers' experiences of role changes in the transition to a more community-oriented approach, characterized by ambulatory work, the facilitation of local resources, multi-disciplinary collaboration and user participation. The empirical data consists of qualitative data from two cases: a political reform in the Netherlands (The Social Support Act), and a user-initialized project in Norway. Ten social workers from nine different organizations were interviewed in the Netherlands, and four social workers from one community-based project in Norway. We analysed these as a multiple case study of a transformation towards community-based practice, but one in which the political and organizational context differs. A common theme was the changing of the roles of the social worker and the subsequent experiences of challenges in different contextual settings. We present our findings under the topics of identity work, differing organizational expectations and role conflicts. Social workers in both the Norwegian and Dutch sample express experiences of multiple roles, vague roles and conflicting roles, with our analysis showing that role stress was common in both cases, regardless of whether the initiative was top-down or bottom-up. Remedying role stress could be a crucial element in processes aiming at user participation, social cohesion, cross-disciplinary cooperation and strengths perspectives.