A BOOK TO KEEP ON WALKING

So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep
walking. (Eduardo Galeano, 1993)

In 2013, the UN-rapporteur on Extreme poverty and human rights, Magdalena Sepúlveda, issued a report on participation of people living in poverty, in which she clearly explains how poverty is manifested. “Poverty manifests itself in many ways, but at its core is an inability to participate or influence the decisions that profoundly affect one´s life, while decisions are made by powerful actors that neither understand the situation of people living in poverty nor necessarily have their interests at heart.” (Sepúlveda Carmona, 2013).

The recently published book Involving Service Users in Social Work Education, Research and Policy: A Comparative European Analysis, composed and edited by Flemish lecturer-researchers Kristel Driessens and Vicky Lyssens-Danneboom, is about influence and understanding, but also about dignity and rights. Participation of service users is at the core of the book. Participation is key, not just to overcome situations that keep them stuck in poverty, but also to influence narratives and decisions. This is done by building common understandings in a context in which mutual ignorance is more the rule than the exception. The mutual ignorance of people living in precarious situations on the one hand and policymakers and social professionals on the other, is brilliantly described in Chapter 4: “It concerns ignorance of each other’s living situations, each other’s feelings and expectations, each other’s values and norms and each other’s thinking patterns
and solution/ survival strategies”.