Abstract
Context
Social work has experienced long-standing tensions between care and control since its inception. As shifting moral, social, political, intellectual, and market forces have historically shaped social work agendas and practices, so have feminists through politics, research, teaching, and praxis. While radical and critical social work has frequently pushed back against oppressive systems and movements, social work and feminist social work frequently find itself colluding with and/or being coopted by institutions and systems that oppress, coerce, and control certain people and communities.
We need not look far for evidence of these tensions, including but not limited to social work practice and interventions steeped in carceral logics and rescue-based work poignantly evidenced by the now defunct Project Rose (Wahab & Panichelli, 2013).
Gramsci (1992), pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will, captures the spirit from which we write this editorial, and we turn to paperson’s (2017) A Third University Is Possible for inspiration and critical hope, as we contemplate the tensions above and the emotions they engender. The bits of machinery that make up a decolonizing university are driven by decolonial desires, with decolonizing dreamers who are subversively part of the machinery and part of machine themselves. These subversive beings wreck, scavenge, retool, and reassemble the colonizing university into decolonizing contraptions. They are scyborgs with a decolonizng desire. You might choose to be one of them. (p. xiii)
A Note on the Scyborg
Scyborg is shorthand for structural agency. The scyborg operates within and without apparatuses. S-he is the decolonial rider within the circuitry of colonizing machines, and hir black gown is continuous with the carbon dust that smokes through their best hermetically sealed works. The scyborg moves at multiple scales; the scyborg is personal; the scyborg is collective. The difference between the scyborg and other orgs is the machine is that the scyborg grasps hir decolonial possibilities. S-he knows hir broom-stick can’t carry hir beyond colonization, but with it, s-he might rake together a decolonizing golem. (paperson, 2017, p. XXV)
In this editorial, we highlight some enduring social work commitments and practices that we believe can support the scyborg’s mission and offer critical hope in our time of need.
Counter-Narratives (and a Different History of Social Work)
Discourse of human potential and social–democratic participation represent a specific knowledge base of social work (Philp, 1979). Social workers are frequently trained and practiced in the art and science of counter-narratives. The work of the counter-narrative is political in that it disrupts the “taken-for-granted” stories of dominant culture by insisting consideration of alternative voices and accounts. Counter-narratives offer a different story. While social workers offered counter-narratives at the turn of the 20th century when they challenged conceptions of charity, articulated objectives rooted in principles of justice and offered structural explanations for social problems (Reisch & Jayshree, 2012, referencing Stuart, 2008; Stern & Axinn, 2012), we’d like to suggest that social work in the United States considers a different origin story. That is, tell the story of social work as one that begins with genocide, colonization, and slavery rather than begins with the evangelical and reform movements. Unless we “upend the whole project, we will continue to see social service as ‘our’ effort to include more people (‘diverse people’) in the American dream” (S. Chandler, personal communication, March 20, 2018). A counter-narrative of the history of social work that begins with genocide and slavery is crucial in deconstructing the image of a city on the hill, as are other counter-narratives about healing, gender, belonging, health, community, and citizenship, just to mention a few.
Social Work’s Long History With Feminisms
The relationship between feminisms and social work, while deep and inspiring, is also complicated and fraught. As white, settler colonial feminisms have dominated mainstream social work policy, scholarship, and practices for centuries, the dreams and desires of women/people of color, indigenous, queer, and immigrants have been systematically marginalized and erased (Park, 2015). The ways that social work education recruits and trains doctoral students so often to fit the status quo, that is, mute critical epistemologies, structural critiques and analyses, offer some evidence of these types of ongoing erasures (Ortega & Bush-Armendariz, 2014).
As vibrant participants in the North American settler colonial project (Johnsteone, 2018), white, settler colonial feminist social work played an active role in the architecture, construction, and execution of settlement services (rooted in assimilation and hegemony), offering some of the scaffolding for contemporary social work. Valverde (2008) notes that these types of services and helping offered “settler feminists” (Henderson, 2003) some power and social capital through roles of female leadership in some spaces and through their roles and identities as rescuers and reformers, care and control.
Kemp and Brandwein (2010) point out that social work and feminisms are both rooted in the civic involvement, institution building, and social activism (p. 341). Other scholars have discussed the compatibility between feminisms and social work, citing the importance of diversity, praxis, critical reflection, the inherent worth and dignity of all individuals, the value of considering individuals within the context of their environments, attention to power in all its forms and dimensions, and perhaps most importantly the centrality of social justice and social change (Collins, 1986; Gould, 1987; Kemp and Brandwein, 2010; Nes & Iadicola, 1989; Swigonski, 1994; van den Bergh & Cooper, 1986; Wahab, Anderson-Nathe, & Gringeri, 2014; Wendt & Moulding, 2016; Wetzel, 1986). These values feed our critical hope. Feminisms alone can’t decolonize social work, but they can lend force and support to the scyborgs (in and out of social work) working to repurpose social work institutions and technologies for more liberatory aims.
Commitments to Social Justice
Despite the absence of an agreed upon definition, clear guidance for how to achieve social justice, and clear illustrations of its application (Reisch, 2013), most major social work organizations around the world stress its importance. The mission of social justice (even if not enacted fully or robustly) is an ethical imperative (Reamer, 2006) for social workers. Kumsa’s articulation of ethical practice speaks to our understanding of the role of social justice in social work, that is, an ethical practice that situates professional codes within historical, cultural, and political realities: If ethical practice is a practice of healing and liberation, then it involves a process of unlearning oppression. And a process of unlearning oppression involves rethinking and reconceptualizing oppression as a relational process of Self and Other…. To unlearn oppression and engage in the practice of freedom, we need to break down the frozen binary. We need to understand how oppressive relation shifts through the surprising twists and turns of encounters, how the interweaving of different subjectivities facilitates or impedes ethical practice. (p. 101)
We draw additional inspiration from Mignolo and Escobar’s (2010) call for epistemic decolonization as a means to imagine multiple and heterogenous strategies to unlearn oppression and rethink relational processes. They argue that decolonial thinking requires us to untangle the logic of modernity (in our case from social work) from our vision of another future. Is there a way forward for social work that is not invested in modernity and its current investments in the nation, in neoliberal democracy, in global capitalist exploitation? Escobar and Mignolo suggest there is; however, this path requires the intentional parting from global coloniality and a decentering of universal (Eurocentric) logics toward more place-based/geopolitical pluralism. This parting doesn’t mean attempting to exist outside of coloniality but rather cast off the hegemonic assumptions of coloniality.
Commitment to Praxis
Stanley (1990) wrote, “the point is to change the world, not only to study it” (p. 15). Praxis understood as a constant action and reflection process (Friere, 1973), takes shape in social work as a spiral in which research and practice contribute to new theories and refine old ones, and engage social change (Kieffer, 1984). Praxis is also crucial for the development of a critical consciousness, so necessary for ethical, decolonizing, feminist, and critical social work. While we agree with colleagues (e.g., Pease & Fook, 1999) that social work’s commitments and engagement with praxis have been lacking, we find critical hope and possibilities in the myriad of ways social work scholars and practitioners work at the intersections of theory and practice to interrogate social work discourse, to resist and transform oppressions. Resistance requires praxis as it necessitates identifying strategy and tactics. Kumsa (2007) suggests that binaries (self/other, oppressed/oppressor, provider/client, etc.) serve as roadblocks to ethical practice, ethical practice as the practice of justice. Leaning on Ahmed’s (2000) concept of encounters, Kumsa breaks down the binary between Self and Other by locating racism within the process of racialization rather than the racist individual or system and offers an example of decolonizing and antioppressive praxis. She (and other poststructural scholars) offers possibilities for imagining how we might practice our way through persistent binaries (micro/macro, colonizer/settler) that perpetuate the oppressions we aim to disrupt. Praxis and critical reflection nudge us to recognize that antioppressive and social justice–oriented social work often begins with the “masters tools,” that is, hegemonic foundational social categories that we maintain, even nurture, by accepting them, making them inexorable.
Onward
As counter-narratives, feminisms, commitments to social justice and praxis may feed scyborgs in social work who wish to “upend the whole project,” we recognize the need for additional tools, dreamers, and advocates inspired to resist, repurpose, create, write, and practice our way into new possibilities for social work. While escaping the tensions between care and control, as a profession, may be inevitable, we choose to resist the urge to succumb to cynicism and inaction and invite you to join our efforts to feed the scyborgs.