Introduction

This chapter presents two projects in which service users are involved as supervisors of students in social work training at the University of Lund, Sweden, and the University of Agder, Norway. The chapter describes how both institutions relate to and try to solve dilemmas and problems connected to power, inequality and the creation of knowledge within the context of social work education.

Power and inequality in social work

Within social work education it is increasingly recognised that service users should play an active role in the development of education and knowledge (IASSW – AIETS, 2014). However, the many experiences of engaging and involving service users in education have also revealed several dilemmas and problems that need to be addressed. These dilemmas are mainly related to the fact that social work is an area defined by power and inequality in power, which affects social relations and the production of knowledge within that area.

Although the idea of service-user involvement in social work and social work education can be traced to different political and ideological discourses (Rae, 2012; Beresford, 2016), it is deeply rooted in a participatory and democratic discourse. Anti-oppressive practice and the willingness to change unequally distributed power are central to the involvement of service users in social work education as well as in practice and research (McLaughlin, 2009a, 2009b; Beresford, 2016; Beresford and Carr, 2012). The dynamics of power and inequality and their consequences thus become explicitly expressed key points, and we keep a critical focus on the identification of dilemmas and the different kinds of problems related to involving service users in social work education.

We find it useful to take a structural perspective on relations of power and their impact on social work, practice and education. We are here inspired by Bourdieu, who pictures inequality in relations of power as inequality in social positions distributed within a social field. These relations of power are, in Bourdieu's terminology, a result of struggles over worshiped goods or capital (Bourdieu, 1984). Bourdieu's concept of field is useful for helping us understand, reflect on and analyse these struggles and their outcomes. The increasing demand for user involvement in social work education has brought new agents into the field. Both user organisations and service users are invited into the field of social work education.