From human rights to transformative change: ‘NAME-IT’, a meta-theoretical model of rights-based praxis

Scholarship on social work and human rights is increasingly steering the debate towards praxis and the development of action frameworks. However, these efforts have hitherto not explicitly inquired into how such approaches contribute to transformative change. Addressing this issue, we engage with dialectical critical realism to embed the ongoing discussions in broader theories of change and unravel the transformative potential of human rights discourses. The result is a meta-theoretical model, ‘NAME-IT’, which systematically unpacks how the dialectic between the reality and the promise of human rights can guide social workers towards transformative action. It forwards human rights as a struggle concept and invites practitioners, researchers and educators to name their violations for what they are. This provides guidance to stretch the discourse of human rights beyond the perimeters of neoliberalism and embed it in an agenda fit for critical and radical social work.