Abstract
The hackneyed accusation that critical modes of thinking in academia, represented by journals such as Affilia, are at once absurd and dangerous has resurfaced in recent months. The central claim against critical scholarship—whether feminist, queer, poststructural, or otherwise—has always been that it is subjective, political, biased, and thus invalid as a basis for knowledge. This truth claim, founded upon the assumption that neutrality, objectivity, and universality are not only possible but necessary to legitimacy, is an epistemic violence. The claim, which occludes the reality that all research and scholarship have always been partial and political, has long served as the foundation for distinguishing the legitimate from the illegitimate: the rational man from the hysterical woman, the civilizing settler from the savage indigene, the industrious North from the slothful South, and the enlightened West from the barbaric East. Grand narratives built upon the claims of objectivity and universality, in other words, have undergirded the violence of all colonial, indeed all genocidal, enterprises.
The epistemic violence central to all such enterprises has never been about distinguishing between objective versus subjective knowledge, but the valorization of some as objective and thus valid, and the dismissal of others as subjective and thus invalid. The question to be asked, to paraphrase Butler (1999, p. xix), is who devises the protocols of “objectivity”? Whose interests do those protocols serve? Affilia was created in 1986 to challenge truth-claims that discount the production of knowledge by, about, and for those who dare to challenge the status quo. The feminist scholars who founded the journal “wanted to hear women’s voices” (Meyer, 1996, p. 141) because such voices have different stories to tell and their analyses contest established truths that foreclose heterogeneity; they work against, in the words of the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “the danger of the single story.”
Editorial board member Jennifer Zelnick reminds us that, “the history of social work is the history of women in social work.
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Few professions have been shaped as clearly by women’s leadership.” Yet a public venue to publish feminist analyses written “as women, about women, for women” (Meyer, 1996, p. 141) had to be created; it did not exist in mainstream social work. In commenting on the difficulty in creating such a space in 1986, Affilia’s founding editor, Betty Sancier, remarked: And no wonder it’s such hard work, since the goal is nothing less than reshaping the world to incorporate the heretofore missing female experience and consciousness. Simone de Beauvoir taught us that necessity in 1949. It is no less true today. (p. 3)
Associate Editor Sheila Neysmith observes that doing this work of “theoretical and empirical knowledge production at society’s margins” that push “the borders of what is defined as evidence and knowledge” is an inherently risky endeavor. Such scholarship requires analyses of power, and as board member Donna Jeffery explains, “analyses that account for the nuance and complexity of social hierarchy and the systemic reiterations of social exclusion and dominance” remain very much marginalized in mainstream social work. As board member Mimi Kim emphasizes, however, in these troubled times, “a world where individuals and communities continually face misrepresentation, denigration and erasure” our commitment “to providing a platform for radical scholarship that dismantles the structures and processes that patronize, marginalize, and confine marginalized groups and diverse feminist pedagogies of liberation” is ever more important. Whatever the risks, board member Tina Sacks urges, “we should not shy away from research that starts from this critical perspective.” The election of President Barak Obama was not proof of a nation in which racism had ended, but an exception that proved the continuing rule of racism. Similarly, the recent attack on feminist, critical, postcolonial, and poststructural academic journals reminds us that claiming spaces for counternarratives “with an unapologetic social work value base,” as board member Jennifer Zelnick describes, remains absolutely crucial. There is much left to trouble and contest, including hegemonic truth-claims that seek to silence those contestations through delegitimizing the very spaces of contestation.
This is a task of particular importance to social work, writes board member Shirley Chau: “womyn and feminist-practitioners who are truly aware of the risks of taking for granted the significance of womyn’s voices, protection of their bodies, and the constant fight to have womyns’ contributions made visible, acknowledged, and reinforced to stay in the history books need Affilia.” The kinds of scholarship Affilia highlight, board member Barbara Levy Simon reminds us, “helps social workers to imagine ways in which to decolonize social work practice and research.” The journal has for decades now, affirms board member Shweta Singh, “provided and promoted knowledge that dismantles the structures and processes that patronize, marginalize, confine, and judge women within academic space” and must continue to do so.
Sancier (1986a) insisted that from its inception, there has never been a “feminist orthodoxy” (p. 4) in the pages of Affilia. It has been a space that has published a wide array of voices—from “the most disaffected” to the “most consensus seeking” (p. 5). It has welcomed a diversity of feminisms: “[r]adical ideas, reform ideas, reconciliation ideas” (p. 5), all. She invited dissent. …if Affilia is to be the dynamic, evolving, developing, ever becoming identity we envision, even more is required of you, its supporters and praise singers. We need you to challenge, to question, to argue, to dispute, to contest, and to demur. (Sancier, 1986b, p. 5) As social work anticipates a Trump agenda—part of a world-wide resurgence of white supremacist antidemocratic neoliberal agendas that disenfranchise so many—we must refuse further cooptation by state systems that perpetuate violence and oppression. We invite you to join us in our efforts—to rethink, to reexamine, to challenge, and decenter, and thus reshape the discourses of social work in these dangerous times. (Park, Wahab, & Bhuyan, 2017, p. 9)
In solidarity.