Advances in Social Work
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Published By Iupui University Library

2331-4125, 1527-8565

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 259-273
Author(s):  
Jennifer McCleary ◽  
Estelle Simard

The US social work profession has historically claimed primarily middle-class white women as the "founders" of the profession, including Jane Addams and Mary Richmond. Scholarship of the history of the profession has focused almost entirely on settlement houses, anti-poverty advocacy, and charity in the late 1800s in the northeastern United States as the groundwork of current social work practice. Courses in social work history socialize students into this historical framing of the profession and perpetuate a white supremacist narrative of white women as the primary doers of social justice work that colonizes the bodies and knowledge of Indigenous people and their helping systems. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the US have always had indigenous systems of social care. Yet, the social justice work of BIPOC, and especially Indigenous people in the US, is left out of the dominant narrative of the history of social work practice for several reasons including racism, colonialism, and white supremacy. In this paper the authors contribute to the critique of the role of white supremacy as a colonizing process in social work history narratives and discuss frameworks for decolonizing social work pedagogy through a reconciliatory practice that aims to dismantle white supremacy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 481-499
Author(s):  
Danté Bryant ◽  
Karen M. Kolivoski

Although there is a growing body of literature denoting social work’s efforts to engage many of the internal racial challenges it faces, there remains a paucity of research exploring the impacts of normative-whiteness and White supremacy within the profession. In an effort to address this gap in the literature, this investigation uses quantitative survey responses from 167 non-racially specific, currently active, social work faculty and administrators, and 12 qualitative interviews with African American, currently active, social work faculty and administrators to gain a more lucid understanding of how they view the roles and impacts of whiteness and White supremacy within Social Work. Thematic findings from this investigation include narratological-deception, epistemological-omission, and a divided-profession. Implications for social work suggest the need to equitably incorporate the contributions of racially underrepresented populations, while critically engaging and responding to the “why,” “how,” and “impacts” of their historical omission.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 841-856
Author(s):  
Emily Tillotson ◽  
Susan Smith ◽  
Cheris Brewer Current

A school of social work devised a process to assess the implicit curriculum by auditing the required readings to identify the race and gender of the authors. As a profession, we espouse a strong commitment to social justice and diversity. Yet we know that there are limitations to our objectivity and that auditing is a valuable tool that can reveal biases. The concrete data provided by an audit can help reveal and disrupt entrenched patterns. The audit was conducted by reviewing the syllabi for required BSW and MSW courses. For each text, we collected the names, gender, and race for each author. Across all programs, authors were disproportionately White as compared to the general U.S. population, professional authors, professional social workers, and students in the programs. Similarly, men were over-represented as compared to all of the benchmarks, except for the authors in the BSW program, which was more feminized as compared to the U.S. population. This assessment process adds to the existing toolset by measuring current levels of representation—including over and underrepresentation. It is hoped that auditing will prove an effective tool for doing antiracist and anti-oppressive assessment, however an audit can only reveal where work is needed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 750-765
Author(s):  
Michael R. Riquino ◽  
Van L. Nguyen ◽  
Sarah E. Reese ◽  
Jen Molloy

White supremacist applications of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) result in the disproportionate labeling of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color as violent or severely mentally ill. Racial diagnostic disparities and misdiagnoses are endemic in social work practice, in part because of the DSM’s categorical classification system, which encourages reductive thinking and reinforces implicit racial biases. While courses on psychopathology are common requirements for clinical field placements, the mental health field’s reliance on the DSM often contradicts antiracist curricula. In an effort to address this paradox, we utilize pedagogical approaches that seek to critique and deconstruct White Supremacist applications of the DSM while simultaneously preparing students to enter a field that relies so heavily on diagnostic labels. This is done in part by teaching students to shirk the DSM’s categorical perspective in favor of a transdiagnostic perspective—identifying symptoms or traits underlying human suffering that occur across diagnostic categories and are informed by macro systems of privilege and oppression. Teaching students to adopt a transdiagnostic perspective may disrupt White Supremacist practices in diagnostics by encouraging an acknowledgement of multisystem factors underlying human suffering without relying on discrete diagnostic categories that are prone to racial interpretations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 978-988
Author(s):  
Michael Rangel

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 690-707
Author(s):  
Kerri Fisher

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 672-689
Author(s):  
Dale Dagar Maglalang ◽  
Smitha Rao

As it stands today, social work education falls short in providing critical theories and frameworks that reflect the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Such insufficiencies maintain racism and other forms of oppression that plague both social work pedagogy and praxis. To challenge and dismantle hegemonic curricula, social work education needs to do more to provide the knowledge and tools necessary for anti-racist social work. The purpose of this article is to present five critical theories and frameworks written by Indigenous and People of Color scholars that social work educators, researchers, and practitioners can integrate into their teaching and practice to raise the critical consciousness of social work students. These five postulations are Compa Love, Racial Triangulation Theory, Breath of Life Theory, kapwa, and cultural wealth. The article will also discuss implications for social work education and practice. Centering the voices of under-represented scholars whose epistemologies are rooted in the lived experiences and communities that the field of social work traverses provides a pathway for social work education and practice to be tailored towards self-determination for all.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 460-480
Author(s):  
Erin Hipple ◽  
Lauren Reid ◽  
Shanna Williams ◽  
Judelysse Gomez ◽  
Clare Peyton ◽  
...  

This article discusses the ways that four educators experience the impacts of white supremacy in classroom spaces. We discuss the ways we navigate the tension created when we desire to foster antiracist spaces but are required to work within an academic system that is underpinned by white supremacy. Using tenets of Griot storytelling, we describe our points of origin, provide narrative examples of student interactions, and detail the reflexive lenses through which we processed these interactions. Our narratives specifically seek to center Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and discuss the ways that our training and education has limited our ability to support them in academic spaces. We conclude with an invitation for the reader to sit with us in this space of tension, and some reflexive questions to consider as we exist in this space together. We hope to offer this as a way to continue dismantling the internalizations of supremacy. We also offer this as an opportunity to move away from the problem-solving mentality often applied to issues of racism in favor of fostering a continued, collective healing from the wounds created for all of us by white supremacist systems.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 876-897
Author(s):  
Saanà A. Polk ◽  
Nicole Vazquez ◽  
Mimi E. Kim ◽  
Yolanda R. Green

The continued presence of racism and white supremacy has risen to a crisis level as today’s global pandemic, police abuse targeting Black, Indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC) communities, and mass urban uprisings rock the nation. This article presents a case study of a West Coast school of social work that has carried out a five-year systematic campaign to move all levels of the program beyond a multicultural orientation towards critical race theory. This study reveals the results of a self-organized cross-racial committee within a school of social work, motivated by an ambitious goal to implement a racial justice orientation throughout the school’s personnel, practices, policies, and curricula. The committee has been further characterized by its commitment to engage across the power-laden divisions of field faculty, tenure track faculty, and administrative staff. The article offers documented stages of development, narratives from across differences of identity and professional role, and thick descriptions of strategies that led to the adoption and infusion of an intersectional critical race analysis throughout the school’s curricula. The organic development of the campaign and the leveraging of opportunities throughout the campus and across campuses offer important lessons for other schools of social work undergoing transformational change.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 1020-1044
Author(s):  
Jemel P. Aguilar ◽  
Elisabeth Counselman-Carpenter

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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