Social Work and Narrative Ethics

Most accounts of social work values contain two central conceptual strands: social work ethics and anti-discriminatory practice. Within social work, relatively little attention has been paid to the potential of feminist approaches to ethics, grounded in identity to bring these two strands together. Narrative ethics is an approach which, like the feminist ethic of care, takes identity as its starting point and therefore has the potential to bridge these two distinctive approaches to social work values. However, in asserting the centrality of narrative in the construction of our identities, it moves beyond the feminist approach. Narrative approaches to ethics have been widely adopted in medicine. This paper explores their applicability to social work practice, particularly in the light of an increasing interest in narrative as a basis for practice intervention.