Critical reflection: Concepts and forms of knowledge in a global world

Social work, social intervention, and social innovation face increasingly complex cultural, political, economic, legal, organisational, technological, and professional conditions, and critical reflection centres on processes of dealing with related social problems. Critical reflection is a resource for responding to multifaceted and conflicting dimensions as a fundamental precondition for wonder and potentially for fostering social change beyond current conditions and practices. Only if we challenge and attempt to transform perceptions, can social change be possible. Critical reflection calls into question the power relations that promote implicit or explicit rules. Questioning normative knowledge in a given context may seem difficult in the struggle for reducing social problems, but it is precisely in this embeddedness of issues there is a need for reflection on the very criteria of social conditions. This implies a reflection on the manner of how forms of knowledge provide certain conceptualisations of human life, society, social problems and welfare, and the struggles embedded within them.