Social work stands for the values of humanity. Such a statement would go unchallenged by social workers throughout the world. Yet in this chapter we consider the values of humanity in some detail, recognising that they are both complex and contested, and that humanity is not to be idealised but can be brutally destructive. In pursuing this discussion, we show how a deeper and wider exploration of humanity can be an important source of inspiration for creative social work and can enhance social work’s advocacy of the values of humanity in the contemporary context, where much that seemed to be settled has become unsettled and where people often feel less like rational decision-making beings optimising their wellbeing and more isolated, bewildered and uncertain in a world of paradox and confusion.

Easily overlooked desires and pleasures are also central to the project of Chapter 2, which argues that literary obscenity can be constituted by suggestion and desire, rather than explicit sex. Beginning with the Ulysses trials, obscenity law has conflated obscenity with pornography and opposed it to literary value. By this logic, the category of obscenity contains only those works that employ direct and explicit depiction of certain body parts and actions to incite a prurient response, excluding work that mingles the erotic with the aesthetic, or operates via indirect means. Going against this scholarly and popular convention, this chapter recuperates the category of the obscene by centering appetite, rather than explicitness. Turning to the twin appetites, “Hunger and Lust,” that give the chapter its title, it locates obscenity in writing that allows transgressive or excessive desire to dictate its form, inviting readerly complicity and arousing readers’ own appetites. Juxtaposing texts by James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Rabindranath Tagore, this account of obscenity reminds us of literature’s power to unsettle our understanding of desire itself.

This chapter argues that there is a special relationship between Blackness and speculative fiction (SF). Taking Afrofuturism as a point of departure, it shows that Black SF offers unique and important ways of theorizing key concepts in contemporary Black studies, including pleasure, power, and death. After examining these qualities, it engages in a close reading of the Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah short story “The Finkelstein Five” to show the relevance of Black SF to scholars and authors writing in what poet Elizabeth Alexander calls “the Trayvon Generation.” While Alexander uses the term to describe children coming of age under the post-millennial regime of anti-Black policing and BLM protest, this chapter uses it to explain that authors and scholars entering the profession in the same period have turned to the speculative to critically interrogate the violent rupture of police murder against oxymoronic promises of racial advancement. The speculative thus offers important framing for both the lived experiences of racial violence and fantasies of making a just and livable world.