Social Justice and Human Dignity in Contemporary English Literature: A Social Work Perspective

Contemporary English literature has increasingly become a mirror through which societies examine questions of inequality, marginalization, and the inherent worth of the human person. This paper explores the intersection of social justice and human dignity as represented in contemporary English-language fiction, and argues that these literary representations offer valuable conceptual and pedagogical resources for the profession of social work. Drawing on works by authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Khaled Hosseini, Kazuo Ishiguro, Colson Whitehead, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith, the paper demonstrates how narrative fiction dramatizes the lived experience of oppression, displacement, racism, poverty, disability, and gender-based violence, while simultaneously affirming the dignity and agency of marginalized characters. The paper situates this literary analysis within social work's core values — service, social justice, dignity and worth of the person, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence — and within theoretical frameworks including Rawlsian distributive justice, Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach, and the person-in-environment perspective. It concludes that literature functions as a form of empathic pedagogy for social work education, sensitizing practitioners to the structural roots of suffering and to the resilience of those who endure it, while also cautioning against the risk of aestheticizing suffering without corresponding structural critique.