Professional Encounters with ‘the Other’: Widening Accessibility of Social Work Practices in Urban Neighbourhoods

Abstract Social work professionals in urban contexts struggle to serve different groups equally. Critical social work literature advocates critical reflexivity in social work practices. Focusing on existing support practices, it encourages scrutinising the implicit ways social work practices can maintain and reproduce power imbalances and othering structures. However, it has not examined the tensions connected with phases in which the first contact between clients and professionals occurs and clients’ engagement in social work programmes begins. Stimulated by an empirical research into parenting-support in a city in the Netherlands, this article examines theoretically the notion of ‘encounter practices’ through which professionals reach out to people considered in need of support but not asking for help. We disentangle how encounter practices can be interpreted through different understandings of professional engagement, emerging from either critical or affirmative traditions of social work. The encounter context poses specific challenges for critical reflexivity, but it also offers the possibility of exploring one’s social positioning in relation to others through informal micro-interactions preceding the instalment of professional relations between professionals and parents. Drawing on insights from urban studies, we distinguish ‘fleeting’, ‘convivial’ and ‘engaged encounters’ as different levels of encounter that allow unsettling othering structures in outreach practices. How can social work professionals engage in meaningful encounter with communities that they perceive as ‘distant’ or ‘hard to reach’? Urban contexts with high diversity in social environments can be challenging for professionals because their own life-world does not automatically match that of the communities they serve, and because of the dominance of negative images in society about those who are perceived as ‘others’. This theoretical article focuses specifically on the phase of outreach that precedes actual counselling practices. It argues that specific assumptions in practices of outreach can reinforce unintended exclusion of those perceived as ‘others’ instead of challenging this exclusion. Therefore, this article unpacks different meanings of the notion of ‘encounter’ to allow reflection on the implicit assumptions connected with it. We then propose a reflective way to engage in outreach practices, that allow for different levels of encounter, starting with activities which are