Global Problems, Local Solutions: What Works, What Does Not, What Can We Do?

The inspiration for this special issue came at a faculty retreat held on a glorious late summer day on a bucolic campus. In such a setting, what else would Social Work and Labor Studies faculty think about but intractable problems and impossible solutions! We had been thinking of ways that our two disciplines, social work and labor studies, converge, and the obvious answer was that both were oriented towards problem-solving, as were other disciplines in the social sciences. But what were the problems we were trying to solve? Where did they originate and where were the solutions come from?