This event will formally launch Sociality, a revised and extended 10th anniversary edition of Social Rights and Social Welfare (a book first published in 2015). It introduces sociality as a central theme, making a new and radical contribution to thinking about social rights and human welfare. The subject matter is of interest to scholars, students and practitioners in the areas of social policy, welfare rights and welfare law, human rights, social development, community action, and anthropological philosophy.
The book itself provides modified, re-organised and updated versions of substantive chapters from its previous highly acclaimed edition but offers a wholly new underlying narrative through which to expand the conception of sociality as a foundation on which further to develop and apply the author’s alternative theory of social rights; a theory grounded in the realities of the human condition and of human sociality. Sociality is a term which captures an essential characteristic of the human species and relates to the expectations and practices by which human communities engage with Nature and with one another. It captures a perspective that can reach across disciplinary boundaries and perceptions and provoke new debates. It is a book about connections: the connections between social rights and human welfare; between theory and practice; between debate and reality. It might also be regarded as the culmination of the author’s intellectual journey since, 40 years ago, he stepped away from an intensive 12-year involvement in welfare rights work: a culmination amounting, however, not necessarily – as he will explain – to a final resolution to the conundrums that had driven him into academia.
The launch event will entail an initial introduction to the book in outline, without close attention to specific rights issues (relating, for example, to contrasting theories of need, competing ideologies and specialist policy areas), but focusing on the understanding of human sociality, its frustration and realisation. It will consider the switch in perception; an explicitly humanist perspective by which we might now discuss the meaning of social rights, not primarily as an invention of the capitalist welfare state, but as the means by which human beings have been able uniquely as a species – however inconsistently – to care for and about each other; to sustain love within intimate relationships, foster solidarity within communities and to in various ways to develop the social rights through which they recognise the needs they share with distant others.
The discussion, it is hoped, will explore such thinking in relation to current real-life social care issues, but also in relation to rights-based approaches in prevailing social struggles and welfare crises.
There will be a reception following the event where copies of the book will be available on sale.
Meet our speakers:
Hartley Dean, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, LSE, whose career began with a 12-year engagement (1973-1985) as a welfare rights worker in a multi-ethnic community in Brixton, South London, before becoming a Social Policy academic. Introducing his latest book, he will focus not on specifics of social/welfare rights but upon the extent to which his latest thinking has relevance to core conceptual issues in Social Policy and to the current realities of welfare rights practice.
Tania Burchardt, Associate Director of CASE and Associate Professor of Social Policy, LSE, whose latest work has focused on social care and the social determinants of need, will constructively critique Hartley Dean’s work of sociality in relation to conceptual constructions of care.
Nikky Cato is a freelance author, writer and community engagement consultant and former Chair/Trustee of Brixton Advice Centre. She will be reflecting on the ideas Hartley Dean has now presented and their relevance for welfare rights work in the current era.
Meet our chair:
Kitty Stewart is Professor of Social Policy and Associate Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE). Kitty’s recent research focuses primarily on the causes and consequences of child poverty, the relationship between income and wider outcomes, and policy for young children.
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The Department of Social Policy (@LSESocialPolicy) provides top quality international and multidisciplinary research and teaching on social and public policy challenges facing countries across the world. From its foundation in 1912 it has carried out cutting edge research on core social problems, and helped to develop policy solutions.