Anticipatory Social Work: Foresight-Based Tools for Social Imagining and Collective Praxis

Progress and focus for forthcoming book under contract with Oxford University Press – anticipated publication date: September-November 2024. This is starting to get very real! First draft finished – now entering a multi-month process of editing and finalizing. Thanks for you many expressions of support and excitement about this work. I’m incredibly grateful to be at this place.

Working title: Anticipatory Social Work: Foresight-Based Tools for Social Imagining and Collective Praxis

Anticipatory	Actively considering what the future holds.  Regularly investing time and attention to signs of change along with their meanings, and using tools/frameworks to make better decisions in the present based on these explorations using critical and participatory foresight tools and frames.
Social Work	Evolving global profession with trained individuals who encourage and facilitate well-being and equity in individuals, families and communities and who actively shape systems to better produce justice, health and flourishing as well as to interrupt structural violence in all its forms.
Social	In the context of community and/or society – actively engaged with and paying attention to the ways in which society is constructed.
Imagining	Thinking (and dreaming) beyond what exists to other kinds of possibilities.  This includes considerations of utopias, dystopias and all their mutations.
Collective	With others in meaningful ways focused on the common good.
Praxis	Reflexive justice/liberation/equity/emancipation-fueled practice that seeks to advance what is to what could be.  Acknowledging and navigating issues of modern life (and future forms it may take) in historical and political contexts.  Seeks to interrupt oppression, actively takes responsibility for resistance – and operates from a position of love, curiosity, humility and anger.

L.Nissen/2023