Paradoxes, contradictions, and dilemmas: Reflections on the contours of a pandemic and its implications for social work education

Abstract

Summary

This is a reflective and theoretical article that discusses the impact of COVID-19 on social work practice. The pandemic, which made its presence felt globally from early 2020, continues to have ongoing and significant consequences for lives, livelihoods, public health, and personal freedoms. We argue that, while its specific contours are yet to be comprehensively researched, let alone the final outcomes understood, the pandemic has presented opportunities to develop new ways of thinking about social work and social work education.

Findings

Through a discussion of relevant literature, including a recent work of fiction, we contend that social workers have been able to adapt, to some extent, to the pandemic but in reactive rather than proactive ways. The biopsychosocial and person-in-environment perspectives that characterize social work education, theory, and practice might be greatly enhanced by the introduction of complexity theory in terms of developing new thinking about the theoretical basis of social work, enabling new questions and new strategies to emerge to strengthen social work responses to the challenges posed by COVID-19.

Applications

Arising from this theoretical article, there are many implications for introducing complexity theory within social work education programs. Complexity theory can provide a conceptual frame fit-for-purpose for social work pandemic and post-pandemic theory and practice.

Social workers across the globe have been deemed essential workers in a variety of front-line settings since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in late 2019, notwithstanding that different locales have experienced differing impacts and responses. Social workers found themselves—along with much of the world—grappling with how best to use their skills and professional training to meet client needs in situations and circumstances radically altered. These might include changes to the ways in which services could be offered under conditions of social distancing, the wearing of personal protective equipment (PPE), in-patient isolation, and in the nature of problems experienced by service users including sudden financial hardship, family separations, stresses arising from family concentrations, mental health problems, and unexpected deaths.

For social work, and social workers more specifically, several questions arise:

• How did (and are) social workers managing?

• How does their practice indicate understanding of the contours of the pandemic?

• How are their existing skills and knowledge “holding up” under novel biopsychosocial conditions?

The pandemic has far further to evolve and impact society and comprehensive research to be undertaken before we have definitive answers to these questions. In this article, we argue that an understanding of complexity theory, in particular with regard to the nature of complex adaptive systems, has become extremely important in advancing not just social workers’ theoretical knowledge but, equally importantly, the array of possible interventions, policies, and advocacy strategies that might be brought to bear in advancing professional expertise, made even more pressing by the advent of the pandemic.

In late December 2019, the World Health Organisation was made aware of a series of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology presenting in China, this disease soon after to become known as COVID-19. The first recorded death occurred in early January 2020, and the first case in Australia emerged later in January 2020 (Duckett et al., 2020; Walker, 2020, pp. 37–38). The pandemic has forced all citizens to confront both new ways of managing day-to-day life and unprecedented restrictions to liberties previously taken for granted, at least for those living in the liberal democratic context.

Although striving to present a scholarly reflection, a source of understanding and context can be found in a work of fiction. Writing about the bubonic plague that afflicted Medieval Europe in the 14th century, Waters (2017, 2018) presents a narrative about an unseen, poorly understood predator. This work of fiction resonates as the author highlights the tensions and implications of this unseen predator in terms of social structures, power relations, questions of fact and superstition, tensions between individual liberty and the common good, and a context of both risk and opportunity. These are some of the paradoxes, contradictions, and dilemmas that afflict the contemporary context.

Sometimes described, in popular discourse, as a once-in-a-generation crisis, the pandemic presents new opportunities for social work and social work education. An opportunity to review curriculum content and to fully review the extent to which the curriculum equips graduates to work under conditions of the “new and emerging normal” has been presented. We advocate that holding to the knowledge base developed across the 20th century, largely reliant on a linear reading of the person-in-environment approach, has become self-limiting, possibly formulaic and sometimes fails to appreciate that social work intervention represents the introduction of another system into the presenting scenario.

Differing jurisdictions, both within nations, and across nations, experienced different rates of infection and mortality, differing local responses, and differing rates of restrictions on movement, commence, and so recently taken-for-granted fundamental freedoms. Simultaneously, it would appear that the pandemic has challenged contemporary understanding of the world while also offering opportunities to explore new ways of understanding the world.

Paradoxes, contradictions and dilemmas

The centrality of ethics

Most professions operate within a Code of Ethics evolved over time and specific to the discipline. On a basis that social professions work with vulnerable individuals, Codes of Ethics offer a framework for regulation and avoidance of abuse of power and to ensure the observance of appropriate standards of practice (Dominelli, 2010). In the realities of everyday practice, social workers commonly encounter complicated situations, noting that the challenge of practice is to understand both the inner world of the client, their outer environment, and the ways in which these interact (Sanger & Giddings, 2012). The pandemic has raised significant examples of ethical dilemmas ranging from the debate about the extent of restriction to individual liberty through to questions of which citizens can be prioritized for precedence in the receipt of a vaccine.

While Codes of Ethics can appear deceptively simple, they are underpinned by thought from moral philosophy which has evolved, along varying theoretical contours and cultural contexts, from the ancient to the modern world. The fundamental questions that have occupied this realm of thought pertain to the arrangements in place for any society, relationships between the secular and the sacred, the location and distribution of power and authority, and the extent to which individual autonomy may be surrendered in return for individual safety. As pointed out by Malik (2014), throughout history, periods of political and economic upheaval have commonly led to new insights and ways of understanding that have profound implications for day-to-day life. The Enlightenment period, which swept through Europe in the 18th century severed the roots of traditional culture, secularized institutions, and effectively de-legitimized monarchies and ecclesiastical authority in return for principles of universality, equality, and democracy (Malik, 2014, p. 190). Nevertheless, the tensions remain between individual liberty and the need to act for the common good in all contexts.

The contours of a pandemic

Just as demonstrated by the work of fiction (Waters, 2017, 2018), there is no readily available conceptual framework to explain or understand the nature of what has befallen the world. There have emerged multiple narratives (including conspiracy theories) and contested narratives alongside contested and competing notions of rights both at individual and group levels. The characteristics of the contemporary world have been described as exhibiting volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (Jackson, 2020a, p. 1). The challenge is how to construct lenses that accommodate viewpoints that are both competing and interacting.

Wicked problems

Again referring to the work of fiction (Waters, 2017, 2018), there arose a slow realization that not only was the plague not understood, the traditional approaches of recourse to prayer and seeking absolution as well as reliance on herbal remedies failed to yield the preferred solutions. The concept of a wicked problem describes policy problems that do not correspond neatly to the conventional models of analysis available at the time (Peters, 2017, p. 385). Many contemporary problems have been described as wicked problems as they transcend the borders of traditional policy domains, involve multiple actors across different levels and resist attempts to solve them (Termeer et al., 2019, pp. 167–168). Wicked problems present with multiple possible causes and internal dynamics that could not be assumed to be linear and which have very negative consequences for society if not addressed properly (Peters, 2017, p. 385). It is further suggested that wicked problems require a transdisciplinary response that does not allow the traditional scientific approach of reductionism and objectivity to dominate (Jackson, 2020a).

According to Walls (2018), wicked problems are also characterized by tensions between personal and collective responsibility, supply and demand considerations, government regulation and industry self-regulation and treatment as opposed to prevention. They entail multiple actors and are complex both socially and politically (Peters, 2017). As well as being ill-formulated, information is often confusing, there are multiple decision-makers and widely conflicting values (Turner & Baker, 2019), often with a lack of clarity as to where the ultimate decision-making and responsibility are located.

It has been held that while relatively easy problems have been addressed, the choices facing future policymakers will become ever more complex (Peters, 2017) and interacting problems often prove intractable for decision-makers. It is thinking about wicked problems that ultimately gave rise to the emergence of theories addressing complexity, noting that no one systems approach can understand wicked problems in their entirety (Jackson, 2020a, p. 11).

Complexity theory

From the fictional work (Waters, 2017, 2018), it was clear that there was a threat to the known social order: no man, high-born noble or vassal serf, was safe from the advance of the plague. The established order came under threat with cracks and tensions emergent around traditional lines of authority, obedience, and loyalty. The previously espoused understanding of the social world came under threat due to unknown and poorly understood variables. Within the contemporary context, Jackson (2020b, p. 1) holds that governments are ill-equipped to deal with complex problems as they are uncertain how to act in the face of inter-connectivity, volatility, and a pluralism of perspectives. The same author (Jackson, 2020b) holds that complexity resists universal truths.

Whereas systems theory presumes that systems have identifiable boundaries and generally stable patterns of relationships, complexity theory targets a sub-set of all systems and proposes that organizations occur through the dynamics, interactions, and feedback of largely heterogeneous components (Turner & Baker, 2019). The core concepts deriving from complexity theory are: non-linear dynamics, chaos, emergence, and adaptation in which the forms future states may take are unpredictable (Hodiamont et al., 2019; Turner & Baker, 2019). This gives rise to opportunities for transformation, as distinct from the re-gaining of prior equilibrium, as the ultimate outcome (Gilpin & Murphy, 2008).

There remain debates as to whether complexity theory is a methodology, a conceptual framework, world view or frame of reference (Jackson, 2020b; Long et al., 2018, p. 4). Regardless of this debate, the focus of complexity theory reveals embeddedness, nested systems, fuzzy boundaries, distributed control, self-organization, unpredictability, non-equilibrium, adaptation, and co-evolution (Long et al., 2018, p. 3).

Under a complex system, with multiple interacting components and difficult-to-predict collective behavior, the last thing that happened is almost never informative about what is coming next (Flack & Mitchell, 2020; Gilpin & Murphy, 2008; Hodiamont et al., 2019). In other words, the world is always changing due to factors beyond human control but also due to human intervention (Flack & Mitchell, 2020). These authors (Flack & Mitchell, 2020) describe human societies as collective and coupled: collective meaning that combined behavior affects wider society, and coupled in a sense that perceptions and behaviors depend on the perceptions and behaviors of others and on the social and economic structures we build.

Is there really a problem?

In numerous examples provided by our work of fiction (Waters, 2017, 2018), there are efforts to deny, downplay, or minimize the impact of the spreading plague. Fortunes and alliances were at stake needing protection as a matter of priority. Yet there were also concerns as to whether anyone would be left alive to protect those who may inherit those same fortunes and alliances.

Belief in conspiracy theories is a widespread and culturally universal phenomenon (van Prooijen & van Vugt, 2018). Some studies indicate that people turn to conspiracy theory at times of anxiety: for those who perceive a lack of control conspiracy theory allows the rejection of official narratives and a belief that an alternative explanation is correct (Douglas et al., 2017). At the heart of conspiracy theories is a belief that important events involve secret plots by powerful groups with the intent of achieving malevolent goals (Douglas et al., 2017; van Prooijen & van Vugt, 2018). Further, conspiracy theory explains away complex phenomena and offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth (Applebaum, 2020, p. 45).

Added to this mix, is a social world in which the internet and social media platforms are largely unregulated (Hartcher, 2020). One commentator has noted (Editorial, 2020) that the extent of misinformation has the potential to undermine efforts to respond to the pandemic, the issue being that the concern ought to be not only with false stories and incorrect information but with a tendency for people to believe the news they wish to believe (Applebaum, 2020). The pandemic has also been accompanied not only by misinformation but by an increased level of hostility and abuse (Hartcher, 2020), as well as threats to the reporting by mainstream media (Towell, 2020).

Social work

Human beings and their problems, however, have always been complex, messy, and difficult to predict. Intervention has always involved a level of uncertainty, challenging practitioners to hold a sense of not knowing, at times not doing, and to balance competing risks in a context of uncertain knowledge. Human problems have become both more complicated and more complex. In addressing the social there is a tendency to never know if the response is totally appropriate (Jackson, 2020b). At the same time, the nature of institutional arrangements designed to respond to human need continues to be contested although, as demonstrated by the pandemic, governments everywhere have moved away from established narratives to address the extraordinary need unfurled by this global health crisis.

Social work, as a profession, emerged in the latter half of the 19th century, largely in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, with developments in each context influencing developments in the other. As the diffusion and span of professional social work gathered pace in the 20th century so did the development of social work theory. However, to a large degree, social work has continued to rely on theories developed in the 20th century under different conditions of day-to-day life and human experience. Social work has sought to be guided by theory, a central purpose of which is to solve problems: that is, the identification of problems, the assessment of the dimensions of the problem, and resolution of the problem (Payne, 1997).

A foundational concept is the call to understand people, and their difficulties, from a lens of person-in-environment. This comprises the quest to understand the person from the perspective of their total life experience within their biopsychosocial context. This also means consideration of the personal through lenses such as gender and ethnicity as well as through other structural elements such as policy imperatives which also impact. Policy choices have the potential to impact in possibly unintended ways, privileging some and disadvantaging others. For example, the policy choices related to the neo-liberal agenda have arguably led to a widening of the gap between rich and poor with there being an increasing concentration of global wealth held by the upper percentile of the population (Edwards, 2020; Piketty, 2014, 2020).

The early theories largely sought to understand social problems through a lens that focused on the individual as the source of the problem but this stance began to come under challenge in the latter half of the 20th century. Taking a broad view of the person-in-environment concept, the quest was to not only understand individual pathology but also consider the broader contextual influences. These include notions of structural social work and also systems analysis. Emerging during the 1970s, this theoretical approach challenged the focus on the individual, critiqued the dominant narratives around patriarchal capitalism, and sought to adopt approaches seeking to transform society (Hick & Murray, 2009). Structural social work identifies the environment as the source of social problems and also exhorts social workers to possess a nuanced analysis of contemporary social, political, and economic issues (Mullaly, 1993 cited in Hick & Murray, 2009, p. 91).

Although social work draws on a range of theories, from its own and other disciplines, consideration of crisis theory and risk management lend themselves to this discussion. The central idea of crisis intervention is that every person, group, and organization can experience a crisis set off by hazardous events, and while some can be anticipated, such as a changing life stage, others are unexpected (Chenoweth & McAuliffe, 2012). What happens at the point of crisis is that equilibrium is disrupted and normal coping mechanisms are found to be ineffective. Although the crisis represents a threat it also represents an opportunity to find new ways of understanding and doing things.

Indeed the pandemic “insisted” that social workers develop new ways of service delivery under conditions of not only lockdown but restrictions to movement and restrictions to time spent with clients based on government directions as distinct from client needs. Accordingly, the approach became more inquisitorial than observational. In the aged care field, for example, reliance on client reports as to their ambulatory abilities as opposed to opportunities to observe the client walking was all that was possible. Similarly, social workers needed to rely on client reports alone regarding the safety (or otherwise) of the home setting including considerations of hygiene levels and evidence of hoarding.

Also associated with the unfolding pandemic and associated responses was, in many practice settings, recourse to the use of technology, hitherto limited, with minimal direct client contact. At this level, social workers have been forced to shift from “preferred ways of working” to “allowed ways of working” and to find new ways of engaging with clients in a context that restricts direct contact. This particularly has had implications for engagement especially with the use of telephones that allow no direct observation. The challenge is that the social worker remains more of a “stranger” to the client than is the case with direct face-to-face contact, and increasingly “ice breakers” tended to recount experiences of the pandemic at the cost of gentle humor and discussion about the football or the family pet. In essence, the exchange has become more focused on the collection of required data than the formation of a relationship, however brief.

Discussion

The pandemic heralded a confluence of factors that were, at once, both complex and contradictory. It highlighted issues of complexity, wicked problems, moral and ethical questions, and difficult policy choices in a context of a fundamental health crisis resistant to efforts to control it, all with devastating economic impact. The prevalence of uncertainty, so characteristic of “pandemic times” unsettles and increases anxieties, both personal and communal. Previous confidence that the capacity to predict and bring about planned change has been disrupted. Reality has become many-faceted and it is difficult to know how to best respond (Jackson, 2020b).

The pandemic clearly highlighted the need to rely on understanding of service delivery from paradigms not traditionally associated with social work service delivery, as outlined in the foregoing, and to do so under conditions of strengthened and centralized decision-making over domains previously thought to rest firmly in the private sphere. The pandemic has also highlighted the reality that there are no universal truths upon which social workers can build interventions with reasonable certainty that preferred outcomes will be realized. Clearly, practitioners have had to adjust their modes of working and to adjust to service delivery in a context that is, at once, unfamiliar and highly fluid.

But what are social workers doing during this health crisis? There has been little time since the start of the pandemic for us to gather or evaluate their action. However, we do have snapshots from some social workers regarding their practice responses to these confronting circumstances. In response to a call for brief reflective pieces from Australian social workers published in several issues of Australian Social Work, practitioners recounted their efforts to adapt their practice, demonstrating flexibility and innovative strategies to accommodate client needs and manage their own emotional well-being in contexts characterized by uncertainty, dynamic change, and anxiety (Anastasi, 2020; Booth & Venville, 2020; de Kam, 2020; Hatzipashalis & Greenwood, 2020; John et al., 2020; Lording, 2020; Olivieri, 2020; Semmens, 2020; Swida, 2020). Importantly, several reported positively on the utility of the social work imperative of holding fast to a recognition of the biopsychosocial impact of the pandemic on clients and direct their interventions with that in mind. These social workers were, significantly, reporting on a situation of crisis for which they believed they possessed the many vital skills their training and prior experience has made available.

What is absent from these reports however, (partial and selective as they are) is much sense of understanding, theoretically speaking, the nature, cause, and impact of phenomena such as a global pandemic. Their attention is firmly placed on the micro. Their accounts show them fitting with organizational directives and responding uncritically to what they are called on to do, albeit sometimes in creative and innovative ways. What they do not appear to be considering is either the limited capacity of “traditional” social work theory to offer a framework for analysis or opportunities to develop new ways of understanding the world and how social work should best respond. In other words, they are responding to mechanistic prescriptors which do not necessarily lead to better outcomes (Munro, 2010 cited in Jackson, 2020a, p. 13).

Although the pandemic has been described by many commentators as a “once in a lifetime event,” this cannot be seen as a reason not to explore the opportunity to re-calibrate existing social work knowledge and education. The reality is that the emergence of new infectious diseases is driven by environmental, social, and economic change (Duckett et al., 2020). Indeed those same authors hold that rapidly increasing global trade, travel, environmental degradation, and climate change have altered disease pathways potentially increasing the risk of a pandemic (Duckett et al., 2020, p. 10). The emergence of any new infectious disease introduces risk to individual health, risks to the health system, and economic consequences with governments needing to respond to these issues as interrelated and not as trade-offs (Duckett et al., 2020, p. 13).

We recognize that the world of direct service delivery is, and has long been, complex and messy and that the theory that has guided social work has tended to rest on a linear approach moving from problem identification to problem solution. A central question is, therefore, whether this framework has the ability to be sustained in the 21st century. From a social work education perspective, there needs to be decreased emphasis on single theoretical paradigms for informing assessment and intervention toward models that emphasize grappling with multiple theoretical considerations at the same time as well as multiple understandings of human experiences, considering both different drivers of that experience as well as different world views. More specifically, the need is to equip social workers with increased abilities to sit comfortably with “not knowing” but retaining an ability to take action in such context without certainty as to the impact of that action

Complexity theory offers a useful theoretical vantage point from which to consider not only the challenges thrown up by the pandemic but also the shape of future practice with far from guaranteed outcomes. It has the capacity to offer a deeper appreciation of both the strengths and limitations of existing theoretical perspectives enabling the emergence of a deeper understanding of the complex scenarios social work engages with. Using casework as an example, the issues are often conceptualized as a tension between the personal and the structural. Such a binary perspective, however, understates the true interactions as occurring between autonomous individuals who exist in a personal, family, and community context (with there being various stated and unstated expectations at each level) and within a context of local, national, and global conditions subject to continuous change that is both predictable and unpredictable.

Complexity theory asserts that systems are self-organizing, and the non-linear co-evolution of complex systems adapt to, rather than impact, on each other. These changing contexts also constitute the environment for each system. As such, each facet of the constructed lens is, of itself, complex and affected by multiple factors. Each of the lenses also interacts with the others in a non-linear fashion. In particular, complexity theory offers two particular opportunities. Firstly, instead of seeking to look back and “learn from history,” we can engage with the notion of emergence, and its concomitant focus on adaptation, as well as the concept of transformation (Flack & Mitchell, 2020; Gilpin & Murphy, 2008; Hodiamont et al., 2019), creating practices and policies that have these elements—emergence, adaptation, and transformation—at their core. This has particular implications for social work theory that has largely sought to achieve equilibrium and problem resolution, offering a belief that certainty about the future is attainable.

Social work has demonstrated a particular interest in the notion of reflective practice and the centrality of this to all practice (Adams et al., 2009), meaning the creation of time and space to work through decisions made, the sources and drivers of decisions and actions with a view to learning from them and responding in ways which offer insights and choices about how to “go on.” Our epistemologies and practice theories provide us with mental models, which in our view, should now include those derived from complexity theory. Under conditions of reflective practice, these mental models and ways of understanding can become objects to be shared, subject to questioning, critique, and thus the enablers of the emergence of other ways of thinking, acting, and doing.

At the practice level, the interconnectedness and interdependency of systems become clearly revealed. Take, for example, the social worker as a member of a multidisciplinary health team charged with making decisions for the discharge of patients (McDermott, 2014). Here, the differing conceptual models and professional knowledge brought by a range of health disciplines come into play, gathered together in an organization mirroring a wider moral and ethical landscape. A complexity-theory informed perspective would suggest that “better action” is more likely to occur when these different models are deconstructed and shared, where areas of difference, for example with reference to understandings of risk as they relate to the patient, are seen, and areas where “no one knows” can be made overt. The task of the team and the social worker then is to disentangle knowledge, values, and interests in order to find common ground for action.

Secondly, and closely associated with the first opportunity, there are opportunities to disrupt the risk discourse, and instead of concerns to “scientifically” manage risk, rather to become comfortable with uncertainty, including at the policy level. The need is to move away from seeking to forecast and control outcomes toward designing systems that are sufficiently robust and adaptable to respond to a range of circumstances (Flack & Mitchell, 2020). As Ling comments (2012)

…rather than seeing an intervention as a fixed sequence of activities, organised in linear form, capable of being duplicated and repeated, …an intervention (includes) a process of reflection and adaptation as the characteristics of the complex systems become more apparent to practitioners.

This ensures that practitioners can then be “…held to account for their intelligent adaptation rather than slavishly adhering to a set of instructions” (p.85).

As our fictional guide illustrated (Waters, 2017, 2018), this pandemic has introduced a convergence of factors: ethical challenges, economic challenges, public health challenges, and social work practice and education challenges. It has also heralded that the boundaries between each of these systems are poorly defined, relationship patterns vary and future states, or the “new normal,” remain unpredictable. It is complexity theory that offers capacity and opportunity to re-frame adaptation and transformation as the ultimate outcomes of this global crisis.

Limitations of the study

In this article, our intention has been to think about the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social work theory, education and practice. Our understanding is limited both by the fact that the pandemic is yet to run its course and, as a consequence, by the unavailability of comprehensive research into that impact. In addition, the virus itself is constantly changing and producing different variants, each of which may impact human and planetary life differently. Importantly, the pandemic is, by its nature, a global phenomenon and its repercussions and ramifications are likely to be responded to differently across the globe. What this might come to look like and how we will be best able to respond to it will only be revealed with the passage of time, further scholarship, and research.

Conclusion

That the consequences of the pandemic have been significant is, perhaps, an understatement but, however deep the crisis, there remains an opportunity for both adaptation and transformation. Indeed, again returning to the work of fiction (Waters, 2017, 2018), those with foresight could see the emergence of opportunity once the pandemic passed. Such opportunities might proceed to new ways of doing things and re-alignment of social systems and ways of understanding the world.

In particular, we contend that the pandemic offers an opportunity for social work educators to review and evaluate their offerings against a backdrop of complexity theory. It is also an opportunity for practitioners to think about reviewing their practice under conditions of wicked problems, differing—often contested—perspectives, policy challenges, and emergent risk conditions that are at once unpredictable, competing, and subject to continuous change. In essence, the theory that evolved through the 20th century is limited in understanding what we now see as the significantly more complex social and structural arrangements of the 21st century emphasized by a global pandemic.

We are not advocating, however, that there be dedicated teaching of complexity theory. Rather, the philosophical bases of social work curricula, in any context, ought to embed complexity as a guiding principle, and foundational conceptual framework, there being opportunity to embed such a framework in the teaching of individual units, most particularly field education as the point at which students begin their exposure to the world of practice.

We began this article by posing these three questions:

• How did (and are) social workers managing (the impact of the pandemic)?

• How does their practice indicate understanding of the contours of the pandemic?

• How are their existing skills and knowledge “holding up” under novel biopsychosocial conditions?

We are not able to comprehensively answer these questions although, in isolated snapshots, we glimpse some of the ways social work practitioners are thinking about and practicing. What appears clear, however, is that social workers have found ways to adapt and continue to deliver services under conditions of profound change and uncertainty. In posing the questions we are outlining the directions that future research and evaluation of teaching and practice might take. They are, in our view, essential questions to be asking as we live with (and through) the ravages of COVID-19.