Priscilla Dunk-West is a sociologist and registered social worker. Her scholarship is concerned with identity/selfhood, professional selfhood and self-making. She researches in the area of selfhood, sexuality and gender and professional self-constitution. Over the past 13 years she has divided her time between Australia and England where she has worked both in social work practice and in academia. She is currently senior lecturer in social work and academic head of field education at The University of South Australia. In 2011 she co-edited, along with Trish Hafford-Letchfield, Sexuality and Sexual Identities in Social Work: Research and Reflections from Women in the Field, published by Ashgate. Her latest book How to be a Social Worker: A Critical Guide for Students uses an interactionist notion of self to understand professional self-making in social work.
Fiona Verity is adjunct Professor of Social Work, Flinders University, South Australia and both a social worker and sociologist. Before academic life she worked for 17 years in community development and management roles, mainly in the community health sector. She has maintained an active engagement in working with community organisations. She has conducted research on the impacts of insurance and risk management on civil society after the collapse of the insurance company HIH, food affordability and access, and community based health promotion. Her recent post was Dean, School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University. With Joy Noble, she is the author of a little book calledImagine If: A Handbook for Activists, published by Wakefield Press.