Why the Body Matters in Social Work: Embracing a Carnal Practice

In today’s fast-paced, bureaucratized practice landscape, the body is often missing from the picture of social work. Despite its centrality in lived experience, the physical, emotional, and sensate realities of practitioners and service users are largely ignored in both theory and practice. In a recent article, For a Carnal Social Work, I make a case for why this omission must end.

Drawing from a wide-ranging review of literature, I explore how the body is represented—or more often, erased—within social work. The article culminates in a powerful call to reframe the discipline through a carnal lens, emphasizing embodiment, intersubjectivity, and the interplay between personal experience and structural forces. This blog post distills her key findings and argues that a carnal approach to social work is not just overdue—it’s essential.

The Silent Body in Social Work Literature

A striking finding from this review is how infrequently the body appears in social work literature—not as metaphor, but as lived, physical reality. While theorists like Foucault, Goffman, and Bourdieu have informed social work’s academic underpinnings, their influence has not translated into concrete attention to bodies in practice. This omission reflects a broader critique within the social sciences: the body is theorized, but rarely felt.

Although the profession espouses a holistic, person-in-environment perspective, this framework often excludes the most immediate aspect of the person—their body. The review reveals how social work continues to prioritize cognitive and discursive analyses over flesh-and-blood realities. This creates a disciplinary blind spot that marginalizes the full spectrum of human experience.

Missing Bodies, Missing Contexts

I also uncovers significant gaps in representation. Bodies from outside Anglo-Saxon contexts are largely absent, with only isolated studies from countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia addressing unique embodied experiences shaped by distinct socio-economic and cultural conditions.

Additionally, the embodiment of colonialism, racism, and linguistic power remains underexplored. Few studies engage with Indigenous worldviews or the bodily impacts of systemic oppression. Only one article examines the embodiment of language and the dominance of English in global social work discourse. Similarly, gendered and queer bodies—especially cis men and LGBTQ+ individuals—receive limited attention.

From an anti-oppressive standpoint, this narrow representation is deeply problematic. Social work must account for how different bodies move through the world, how they’re marginalized, and how they resist. Ignoring these differences undermines the discipline’s commitment to equity and inclusion.

The Practicing Body: A Silent Partner in Intervention

Despite these omissions, social workers do use their bodies in practice—intuitively, informally, and sometimes deliberately. Whether it’s calming a distressed client through posture, offering a grounding touch, or sensing tension in a room, the body is always present.

Yet, these embodied dimensions of practice are rarely documented or theorized. This silence is especially limiting given the strong emotional and relational stakes involved in bodywork. Without clear standards or frameworks, practitioners may feel unequipped—or even discouraged—to draw upon embodied strategies.

This is a critical gap. Bodywork often requires a strong therapeutic alliance to manage emotions that surface unexpectedly. Without guidance or institutional support, practitioners must navigate these dynamics alone, increasing the risk of harm or ethical breaches. Social work needs a framework that legitimizes and supports embodied practice.

Toward a Definition: What Is the Body in Social Work?

In synthesizing the diverse and often conflicting representations of the body in the literature, I offer a new, integrative definition:

“The body is the material site within which forces and experiences culminate, building upon and in relation to one another over time, entailing physiological, sensate, cognitive, intersubjective, sociocultural, systemic, structural, and environmental dynamics.”

This definition resists oversimplification. It affirms that the body is not just a biological shell, nor merely a vehicle for identity, but a site of complex, layered interactions. It invites social workers to consider how lived experience, power structures, and sensory awareness intersect within the body.

Enter Carnal Social Work

Building on this definition, I propose the concept of carnal social work—a practice grounded in the understanding that bodies are central to social work encounters. Drawing from Wacquant’s (2015) carnal sociology, this approach foregrounds vulnerability, affect, skill, and power as they manifest in the body.

In Wacquant’s (2015) words, humans are “sensate, suffering, skilled, sedimented, and situated creature[s] of flesh and blood.” (p.6) A carnal social work embraces this complexity. It does not treat embodiment as a personal issue to be managed or transcended. Instead, it sees the body as a point of contact where individual experiences and social forces converge.

Crucially, this approach does not collapse into individualism. On the contrary, it insists that attending to the body requires attention to the broader systems that shape it—from neoliberal policy to institutional power dynamics. In this way, carnal social work reclaims the body as a political and relational site.

Reflexivity, Habitus, and the Knowing Body

Carnal social work also challenges dominant notions of reflexivity. While social work rightly emphasizes reflexive practice, current models often prioritize cognitive self-awareness over embodied knowing. Practitioners are taught to analyze situations, but not necessarily to attune to their own bodily responses.

I suggest that habitus, as theorized by Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), offer a more holistic framework. Habitus refers to the embodied history of an individual—their dispositions, ways of being, and unconscious patterns shaped by social context. Using habitus as a reflexive tool allows social workers to notice what arises in their bodies and trace these responses back to broader social forces.

This deepens reflexivity. It allows practitioners to consider how their own embodiment—shaped by gender, race, class, culture, and more—affects their practice. It also encourages them to remain present with clients in a way that is grounded, responsive, and accountable.

From Concept to Practice: Challenges and Opportunities

Of course, implementing carnal social work is not without its challenges. Institutional settings often privilege efficiency, documentation, and standardized assessments over relational, embodied engagement. The rise of the “computer social worker,” as Phillips (2019) calls it, reinforces mechanistic approaches that strip away the nuance of human experience.

In such environments, carnal practice can feel subversive. It demands time, presence, and vulnerability. It pushes against the grain of managerialism and demands that practitioners be fully human in their work. For some, this may feel risky. For others, it may be a profound relief.

Yet, I argue that precisely because social workers operate at the nexus of individual need and structural constraint, they are uniquely positioned to embody a more humane, relational mode of practice. A carnal approach offers tools for resisting dehumanization—both in ourselves and in our systems.

The Future of Carnal Social Work

The shift toward a carnal paradigm in social work will require more than theoretical buy-in. It calls for changes in education, supervision, research, and policy. Practitioners need training in embodied awareness and ethical bodywork. Researchers need to document embodied practice and diversify the range of bodies represented in literature. Institutions must create space for presence, slowness, and vulnerability.

Most of all, we must be willing to feel. To notice how our bodies respond in the room. To recognize that those feelings are not distractions, but data—guides that help us understand the worlds we and our clients inhabit.

In the end, a carnal social work is not just about the body. It’s about what the body reveals: about pain and resilience, about oppression and resistance, about connection and care. It asks us not to retreat into abstraction, but to lean into the messy, glorious materiality of life.

keywords: body in social work, embodied practice, carnal social work, reflexivity in social work, Wacquant carnal sociology, habitus and social work, somatic awareness, embodied reflexivity, neoliberalism in social work, person-in-environment critique

Click the link to acces the full article.