Abstract
You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.
As a feminist social work educator and scholar, I have been deeply moved by the outrage and the pain. This emotion is powerful. As feminist, queer theorist Sara Ahmed (2017) suggests, “emotions are a resource; we draw on them” (p. 246), to understand, to make meaning, and to mobilize. At this time of social movement, how will we draw upon this outrage in our social work practice? What can we learn from these movements and what role can individual social workers or the profession as a whole play to bring out the change this outrage seeks?
I take seriously the responsibility to bring social movements into the classroom—to examine current social problems and to encourage students to connect their social work practice to processes that bring about transformative change. Echoing Chandler’s (2018) call, “to model courage,” we must mentor progressive, feminist social workers to become future leaders who engage meaningfully in activism with the individuals and communities with whom they work. Yet I am also reminded of the real constraints social workers face in the current environment in which the politics of professionalism and the neoliberalism impress upon us to measure students and practitioners’ competencies and skills by their market value (Bhuyan, Bejan, & Jeyapal, 2017). Where do social movements and the values that drive them fit within today’s social work defined by short-term contracts, professionalization, and managerialism?
In this editorial, I reflect on contrasting campaigns within social work that seek to reenvision and reinvigorate our potential to enable, promote, and advocate. I firmly believe that progressive, activist, anti-oppressive, and decolonizing agendas are integral to the social work profession. I also wonder, however, if transformative potential of social movements will be embraced and sustained by the profession at large or if radical social work and social workers will remain on the proverbial sidelines as in decades before.
20% in 2020
In 2014, before the upsurge in political activism that followed the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, a special commission to Advance Macro Practice in Social Work launched the #20% in 2020 campaign. This campaign calls on the Council for Social Work Education to ensure that a minimum of 20% of social work graduates concentrate their studies on macro practice and for all curricular content for bachelor of social work and master of social work (MSW) education to be more balanced (West, 2015).
Despite the origins of macro social work in the progressive era, macro social work education had only a brief period of expansion following the civil rights movements of the mid-20th century. Within institutions of higher education, macro social work in both Canada (Jennissen & Lundy, 2011) and the United States (Reisch & Andrews, 2001; Reisch & Jarman-Rohde, 2000) has always been sidelined to the margins of the profession, whereas psychoanalytic and behavioral interventions to address “mental welfare” (McLaughlin, 2008) are seen as bringing public legitimacy to social work, and for many, represents the social work’s primary identity. In the 1960s and 1970s, social work expanded its macro focus; community organizing, community development, and social planning were conceived in social work education and practice as critical skills and methods necessary to bring about equity in the face of segregation, violence against women, homophobia, and disability (among many emerging issues). Through the following decade, however, macro focus retracted such that by the 1990s “only 2.9 to 4.5% of social work graduate students were community or planning practice majors, with the focus among them on traditional community development and planning rather than social change” (Rothman, 2013, p. 3). Today, less than 9% of social work curricular content in the United States focusses on administration, community organizing, planning, and policy.
It remains to be seen whether the call to action promulgated by the #20% in 2020 campaign will be embraced by the National Association for Social Workers or social work educational institutions in the United States. To be realized on the ground as a force for real change, the push for macro curriculum must respect the individuals and communities who are urging and organizing for change. It is imperative that the emphasis on increasing “macro” content is accomplished in a way that does not place social workers at the center but trains workers to collaborate with individuals and communities organizing for change. While mass social movements are raising public attention—including among social workers—we must also train social workers to do the “backstage work” of community mobilization; to work with individuals, constituents, and communities; and to foster creative solutions to the problems they face. While there are pressures within the profession for social work graduates to fill a range of roles within community and human service organizations—including administrative and management responsibilities—the emphasis on increasing “macro” content cannot place social workers at the center, but rather focus on collaboration with those organizing for change.
A Statement of Complicity and Commitment to Change
As a complement to the call for increasing macro social work education in the United States, Canadian schools of social work are currently stepping up to meet the 94 Calls to Action that were put forward by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 2016). The TRC was first formed in 2008 as an initiative of the federal Canadian government to take accountability for the legacy of the “residential school” system which facilitated the internment of Aboriginal children from Canada’s colonial period until the last “school” in the province of Saskatchewan was closed in 1996. Many living survivors of “residential schools” took part in healing circles as part of the TRC process to inform the Commission’s denouncement of these schools as instruments of cultural genocide in Canada; the Calls to Action touch all aspects of Canadian society including child welfare, education, health, language, and culture.
In June 2017, the Board of Directors for the Canadian Association for Social Work Education (CASWE) issued a “Statement of Complicity and Commitment to Change” in response to the TRC’s Calls to Action and acknowledgment of social work’s long history in white settler colonial practices (CASWE-ACFTS, 2017). Across Canada, schools of social work are seeking ways to develop and implement new curriculum that considers the role of social workers to redress and change the profession’s intertwined history with the cultural genocide of Indigenous 1 communities. Some changes have taken shape in institutionalization of symbolic gestures of land acknowledgments, expressions of regret, and public sympathy at historic and ongoing injustices like those from university leadership following the recent “not guilty” verdict for Raymond Cormier for the killing of Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old Indigenous girl whose was murdered in August 2014.
Investments in curriculum are also taking shape in the form of specific MSW curriculum that draws upon Indigenous knowledges for social work in Indigenous communities (e.g., MSW Indigenous Specialization at University of Victoria, MSW in Indigenous Trauma and Resilience at the University of Toronto, and specialized doctoral program at University of Wilfred Laurier).
A promising practice to realize this vision has involved the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge, leadership, and elders (e.g., Program Elders at Wilfred Laurier University), to ensure that curriculum guides social workers to “balance their professional social work learning with the development of a holistic cultural perspective steeped in Indigenous knowledge” (Wilfred Laurier University, 2018).
In order to fulfill the goals of the Statement of Complicity and Commitment to Change, we have a collective responsibility to ensure this curricular investment does not separate social work with Indigenous communities as a form of cultural competence, but rather moves toward a cultural safety framework. This requires knowledge of historic and ongoing structural violence produced through the apparatus of white settlerism, through ongoing colonization of Indigenous communities and exploitation of natural resources. Creating spaces for Indigenous knowledge within graduate social work represents a transformative change toward recognizing Indigenous epistemologies as necessary for developing culturally relevant and anti-oppressive social work practices. As Ladson-Billings (1995) advocates, we need “a pedagogy of opposition not unlike critical pedagogy but specifically committed to collective, not merely individual empowerment” (p. 160).
Developing an Intersectional Macro Practice
One of the key lessons from today’s social movements is the potential to mobilize intersectionality as a strategy, not merely to include a more diverse range of people but to examine how we are differently impacted by systems of oppression. In her book, Policing Black Lives, activist and author Robyn Maynard (2017) recognizes that “all Black people are not demonized equally or identically” (p. 12). Maynard encourages us to pay attention to how lives are intersectional; that “gender, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, mental health and place of birth also mediate the way that anti-Blackness is experienced” and therefore require us to reexamine what and whom we imagine when we speak out against antiblack violence, Indigenous rights, women’s rights, immigrants’ rights, fair wages, or protection from discrimination in all its forms.
An intersectional lens also requires that we understand that we are the society we seek to change. This “we” includes those who benefit from current systems of oppression along with historically marginalized groups who continue to be underrepresented in higher education and thus the social work profession. We cannot ignore our complicity and we must make space and recognize the intellectual and political contribution of marginalized subjectivities within social work. As Sudanese black and queer anti-oppression educator and artist Rania El Mugammar stated at a recent roundtable on building an #USTOO movement for immigrant women and women of color in Toronto, intersectionality is not just theory, but a “radical practice.” It is a way of resisting the embodiment of multiple oppressions while envisioning a future where we all belong. This time of profound pain and outrage is an invitation for feminist scholarship and activism on social movements and macro social work.
What can we learn? What can we do? What is our role?