Faculty of Business, Humanities and Social Sciences | School of Humanities and Social Sciences | Economics and International Studies

Professor Jane Fenton

Honorary Visiting Professor

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Jane Fenton is Emeritus Professor of Social Work Education at the University of Dundee. She began her academic career 20 years ago, after 13 years in social work practice, specialising in community justice social work.

Jane’s enduring social work research and scholarship has centred on social work values and their expression in practice; leading to several sole-authored textbooks and numerous articles and chapters. More recently, however, she has become interested in generational changes in the student cohort, including self-censorship and the embrace of critical social justice activism. Jane’s scholarship and publications are now concerned with the grip critical social justice theory has on academia. She advocates for the reclamation of traditional liberal values to ensure social work education and higher education more broadly can fulfil its telos of knowledge production and the search for truth.

Recent publications include:

Enlighten me: teaching social justice in further and higher education by reclaiming philosophically liberal values – a social work education case study

Sticks and stones: the idea that words cause harm and the implications of this for higher education

Check Your Privilege: The Dangers of Teaching a Critical Social Justice Understanding of Society in UK Social Work Education

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