My intentions in this article are fourfold: (1) to show how the discourses of qualitative inquiry and cultural studies in the seventh moment can be put to critical advantage by social work researchers; (2) to discuss the cultural studies assumptions that define a critical social work research agenda; (3) to offer a set of interpretive, methodological and ethical criteria that can be used by social work researchers; thereby (4) establishing the relevance of this approach for the practices of critical social work research in this new century. Throughout I use examples from the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s.
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