For a Carnal Social Work: A Review of the Body in Social Work Literature

Social work practice is charged with concerns related to the body; health, age, gender, sexuality, race, abuse and violence, to name a few. Despite this, the body itself is strangely invisible in social work literature, its experiences often indirectly addressed. The present scoping review seeks to explore how the body is situated and conceptualised within the peer-reviewed social work literature between 2012 and 2022. The wide scope of this review captures a range of articles (n = 148) in many different journals (n = 56), with few tackling the same questions. Moreover, the stories of many bodies are not yet represented in social work literature. Seven broad relational categories were identified: relationship to oneself; interpersonal concerns in health; systemic and structural concerns in health; therapeutic relationships; the body in intervention; embodied structures; and the body in social work education. The results point to the need for a framework through which to see and interpret the body, promoting a more central position in research and practice. Wacquant's carnal sociology (2015) is proposed as an appropriate scaffold for bringing the body into view within social work practice and research. Social workers work with all kinds of people, facing a wide range of difficulties in their lives. Many of the challenges people face involve their bodies in some way. For example, sexism, racism, illness and violence are all experiences that involve the body. Despite this, the body is not something that we always think about in social work. Bodies might be thought of as male, female or transgendered; Black and White; young and old, but often without looking at how these labels relate to people's actual bodies. This article investigates how the body has been written about in social work articles between 2012 and 2022. It found that social workers are concerned with many different relationships to the body; sometimes about the relationships people have to their own bodies, how those influence relationships with others, or how bodies are considered in different systems where social workers practice. Many articles also studied how social workers pay attention to what their own bodies do to help them connect with others. This article ends with a discussion about gaps in the literature on the body and suggestions about how and why it should be more present in social work research and practice.