scholarly journals Is There A Place For Us? Social Workers of Color As Outside Agitators Within the Profession

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 978-988
Author(s):  
Michael Rangel
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Communities Of Color

The outside agitator narrative has been used to discredit and harm people of color for decades. Currently, it is being used as a forceful tactic to separate the movement for Black lives from the broader narrative that racism is deeply rooted in American social structures, institutions, and everyday life. This article examines the implications of how the profession of social work has similarly and simultaneously maintained a culture of white supremacy and racist ideologies in our work. As outsiders in a predominantly white profession, social workers of color act as outside agitators when dispelling myths and practices used in and for communities of color. By centering the lived experiences and knowledge of social workers of color, all social workers can increase their awareness of racism within our profession and work together to dismantle the culture of racism and white supremacy that persists within social work.

Income and Wealth Inequality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurel Sariscsany
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Income Inequality ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Grand Challenges ◽  
Critical Issues

Reversing extreme economic inequality is one of the grand challenges for social work, identified as one of the most critical issues in the field. Two key types of economic inequality, income and wealth inequality are described. Although, wealth and income inequality are often discussed synonymously they have differing levels of inequality and impact clients’ lives differently. Perhaps more importantly, as this article describes, solving income and wealth inequality require differing solutions. The article further explores the specific income and wealth inequality experienced by women and people of color, due in part to discrimination. Lastly, the efforts of social workers to address economic inequality through research, practice, and advocacy are described.

scholarly journals The Future for Social Work in Juvenile and Adult Criminal Justice

10.18060/92 ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 210-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary C. Sarri ◽  
Jeffrey J. Shook
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
The Future ◽  
Effects On Children ◽  
Justice Systems

Critical contemporary issues in juvenile and adult criminal justice are identified followed by an examination of particular issues for social workers, including the increase in incarceration, the over representation of people of color, and the numerous negative effects on children. The various roles for social workers in the criminal justice systems are presented and discussed. The paper also addresses the decline of social work professionals in the criminal justice systems and why it is imperative that the pattern be reversed now that there is growing interest in the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders.

scholarly journals Professional Challenges of the Past 30 Years of Social Work in Romania (1990-2020). Interview with Social Workers(1990-2020). Interview with Social Workers

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-132
Author(s):  
Lídia Berszán
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
The Past ◽  
Professional Challenges ◽  
Insight Into

In the following interview, social workers talk about what this profession means to them and what challenges they have encountered, meet in everyday life. Their responses provide insight into the events of the past 30 years of social work. Keywords: professional challenges of social work, social wellfare system, progresses and deficit areas

scholarly journals Disability Justice, White Supremacy, and Harm Reduction Pedagogy: Enacting Anti-Racist Crip Teaching

JCSCORE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 190-208
Author(s):  
Samuel Z. Shelton
Keyword(s):  
Harm Reduction ◽  
Students Of Color ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Color Experience ◽  
Approach To Teaching

In this personal narrative, I reflect on how I have approached teaching about and for disability justice as a White crip feminist educator. I focus on how I have attempted to be accountable for my Whiteness in my teaching about an activist framework and movement grounded in the lived experiences of queer and trans disabled people of color (Sins Invalid, 2016). Towards this task, I describe my effort to enact what I term a harm reduction pedagogy or an approach to teaching that acknowledges the ongoing violence of whiteness and my participation in it while simultaneously striving to minimize the harm students of color experience in my courses. In the second section of this paper, I describe my process of accountability planning in which I anticipate possibilities for harm and prepare myself to respond to them prior to the moments when they happen.

scholarly journals An Experiential Model for Cultivating Cultural Humility and Embodying Antiracist Action in and Outside the Social Work Classroom

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 690-707
Author(s):  
Kerri Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Systemic Change ◽  
Cultural Humility ◽  
Teaching Tools ◽  
The Social

Social Workers in academia may enjoy seemingly endless discussions and debates on ever-evolving “diversity concepts” including privilege, oppression, microaggressions, and white supremacy culture, but students and would-be allies are often stymied, if not altogether lost by the enormity of overcoming injustice. The 7E model for Cultural Humility and Antioppressive Practice provides specific and creative opportunities for personal and systemic change offering fledgling antiracists both structure and freedom on their unique paths to activism and allyship in keeping with their own individual, intersectional identities and bio-psycho-social development. The seven experiences discussed in the model (exposure, engaging, examining, evaluating enacting, educating, and evolving) are defined and explained. Teaching tools are provided.

The lived experiences of social workers working with refugees in Lebanon

2021 ◽  
pp. 146801732110083
Author(s):  
David P Cecil ◽  
Rachel J Hagues ◽  
Rania Mansour ◽  
Aimee Ghanem ◽  
David E Robbins
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Interview Guide ◽  
Humanitarian Crises ◽  
The Status ◽  
Quantitative Results ◽  
Work Education

Refugee care in Lebanon Understanding the lived experiences of social workers. Summary This mixed methods study examines the status of social work in its response to the refugee crisis within Lebanon, a country with the highest per capita refugee population in the world. Findings A structured interview guide and brief ordinal instrument were administered through interviews ( n = 10) and 10 focus groups ( n = 37) ( N = 47). Participants were recruited with the help of Lebanese social work colleagues. We explored professional roles, greatest refugee needs, social worker coping, and recommendations for refugee social work trainers and educators. Qualitative results are presented as themes with examples of direct quotations. Culturally specific services accurately targeting needs are among the major themes identified. Quantitative results, primarily using descriptive statistics and one Pearson’s r correlation statistic, report on participants’ overall stress levels, sense of effectiveness in refugee practice, and connection of faith/religion to motivation for refugee work. Applications This work is applied as best practice recommendations for social work education and for front-line training of those in social work roles working with refugees in Lebanon. This work also raises awareness about one of the most critical humanitarian crises in history.

scholarly journals Will someone knock on my door? COVID-19 and social work education

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 116-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bharati Sethi
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Social Work Education ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Community Practice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Community Belonging ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Work Education

Guided by a person-in-environment framework and aspirations to advance social justice, the social work profession is concerned with intervening at the individual and society level. In this essay, the author reflects on individualism-collectivism, loneliness, and community belonging in the context of her lived experiences and the COVID-19 outbreak. She maintains that the micro-macro fragmentation is problematic to social work's quest for social justice. Social work must examine the place of ‘community practice' in its professional curriculum to equip students with tools to fully comprehend the changing and increasingly complex social workers' role.

scholarly journals The changing face of social work: social worker perceptions of a neoliberalising profession

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Butler-Warke ◽  
Chris Yuill ◽  
Janine Bolger
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Social Worker ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Core Values ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Prime Ministers ◽  
Form Part ◽  
Worker Perceptions

This article engages with literature on the neoliberalisation of social work but advances the debate by building an argument based on interviews with social work graduates that reveal the perceived changes to the profession over the last 50 years. Based on lived experiences, we show that social work as a profession has experienced significant changes that have occurred both internally and externally to the profession. These changes form part of a larger ideological shift towards neoliberalism. Beginning with the Thatcher administration, intensifying under New Labour’s Third Way and persisting under the Age of Austerity of Prime Ministers Cameron and May, the neoliberalisation of social work has sought to turn it into an outcome-oriented, information-gathering, surveilling profession that no longer relies on its critical and radical value base. We show, however, that despite the neoliberal assault, social workers remain optimistic about the future and loyal to their core values.

Queering Smart Decarceration: Centering the Experiences of LGBTQ+ Young People to Imagine a World Without Prisons

Affilia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 358-375
Author(s):  
Jane Hereth ◽  
Alida Bouris
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Lgbtq Youth ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
People With Mental Illness ◽  
Criminal Legal System

Addressing mass incarceration through smart decarceration initiatives is one of the Grand Challenges for Social Work named by the American Academy of Social Work Welfare and Research. The exponential growth of the U.S. prison system is largely due to legislation that targets marginalized communities, including people of color, poor people, people with mental illness, and those living with disabilities, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people of all ages. In this article, we seek to complicate the current conversation on smart decarceration by arguing that social workers committed to addressing mass incarceration should engage abolitionist theory, politics, and organizing in their work in order to effectively address the root causes driving the buildup of the prison nation. We engage feminist and queer theories as two theoretical interventions that can guide this work. We next describe how LGBTQ+ youth enter the criminal legal system, highlighting how normative systems of gender and sexuality subject LGBTQ+ youth to punitive policing, surveillance, and discipline. Finally, we share three models of prison abolitionist organizing led by LGBTQ+ people of color as case studies. By examining how these organizations embrace queer and feminist abolitionist frameworks, we identify concrete ways that social workers can adopt abolitionist principles and practices in their work to address mass incarceration.

scholarly journals ‘The Mirage of Action’

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 1020-1044
Author(s):  
Jemel P. Aguilar ◽  
Elisabeth Counselman-Carpenter
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Research Method ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
White Female ◽  
Classroom Environments ◽  
Policy Initiatives ◽  
Area Of Study

This autoethnographic study highlights complex strategies for maintaining white supremacy used by “well-intentioned” heterocentric white female social workers that are enacted under the guise of practicing anti-racism in social work practice settings, classroom environments, policy initiatives, and advocacy work. Using autoethnography was both unplanned and deliberate. Unplanned, we needed a research method that allows us to explore the untouchable subject of heterocentric white female social workers and deliberate in that we could use our experiences to break ground and establish white supremacy among heterocentric white female social workers that espouse anti-racist values as an area of study. We draw on education, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines to name some of the ongoing challenges to dismantling racism, colonialist, and reformer narratives in social work, and identify strategies used by all white folx, but particularly heterocentric white female social workers to neutralize the suggestion or accusation of their acts as racism. We name three challenges to dismantling racism among heterocentric white female social workers: hiding behind the data, anti-racist book clubs, and crying and comfort. We conclude with further questions for those who hold power in the field and a reflection upon our own continued intersecting struggles with these concepts.

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