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This paper maps utopian theories of technological change. The focus is on debates surrounding emerging industrial technologies which contribute to making the relationship between humans and machines more symbiotic and entangled, such as robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. The aim is to provide a map to navigate complex debates on the potential for technology to be used for emancipatory purposes and to plot the grounds for tactical engagements.

The paper proposes a two-way axis to map theories into to a six-category typology. Axis one contains the parameters humanist–assemblage. Humanists draw on the idea of a human essence of creative labour-power, and treat machines as alienated and exploitative form of this essence. Assemblage theorists draw on posthumanism and poststructuralism, maintaining that humans always exist within assemblages which also contain non-human forces. Axis two contains the parameters utopian/optimist; tactical/processual; and dystopian/pessimist, depending on the construed potential for using new technologies for empowering ends.

The growing social role of robots portends unknown, and maybe radical, changes, but there is no single human perspective from which this shift is conceived. Approaches cluster in six distinct sets, each with different paradigmatic assumptions.

Mapping the categories is useful pedagogically, and makes other political interventions possible, for example interventions between groups and social movements whose practice-based ontologies differ vastly.

Bringing different approaches into contact and mapping differences in ways which make them more comparable, can help to identify the points of disagreement and the empirical or axiomatic grounds for these. It might facilitate the future identification of criteria to choose among the approaches.

As the next generation of social workers in a continent bedecked by oppressive customs, it is cardinal that the voices of social work students be heard. This study aims to share the reflections of Nigerian BSW students about anti-oppressive approach to professional practice.

Drawing on a qualitative approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted among fourth-year social work students at one of the elite universities in the southern region of Nigeria.

Results reveal that, although willing to challenge oppressive practices, social work students are ill-equipped to apply anti-oppressive approach to social work practice in Nigeria.

This study makes an important contribution to the field and to the existing literature because the findings have broader implications for social work education in Nigeria.

In enforcing the suggestions of this study, it is expected that social work education will become able to produce competently trained students who are only knowledgeable about anti-oppressive social work but are equally prepared to address Nigeria’s myriad oppressive practices that have long undermined the nation’s quest for social development.

The application of the anti-oppressive approach to social work practice is integral to ridding society of all forms of overt social injustice and other forms of latent oppressive policies.

Suggestions are offered to Nigerian social work educators toward ensuring that students are not only well equipped in the understanding of anti-oppressive social work but also ready to apply this model to professional social work practice following their graduation.