The Legacy of Amy Rossiter: A Life Worth Living

It was back in 2004, when Amy Rossiter and I first started communicating. We had just published a chapter called ‘Post-Critical Social Work Analytics’ (2004) in which we raised three doubts about the validity of critical social work, with a focus on the analysis of relations of power. I argued that the mixing of Marxism and Critical Theory with Foucault and postmodernism produced a confused state of affairs. Amy was the first to respond to this and urged that critical social work must undertake the important task of analysing actual relations of power. As Amy described it “I am interested in the small, everyday moments of social work practice and education that carry a history marked by conflict between social justice and social control”.