Abstract
On December 14 of this year, we will conclude our tenure as editors-in-chief of Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work. In pondering this, our last editorial, we have been reflecting on those tumultuous years under the Trump presidency, a time during which some of our worst fears for the political landscape of the United States have come to fruition, and the centuries-deep wounds of systemic inequalities in our communities have been once again laid bare. The past few months of the pandemic have simultaneously isolated us from family, friends, and colleagues while requiring us to provide unparalleled levels of support and care for them. The continued killing of black, brown, and Indigenous bodies at the hands of the police has incensed us, even as we were heartened by the global masses who rose up against such injustices, all the while grappling with the financial, physical, and emotional wreckages wrought by the pandemic. The terrifying storms, floods, and fires that have become commonplace in many regions of the world are insistent reminders of an apocalyptic climate crisis whose effects also, predictably, land most heavily upon those same marginalized bodies and communities (Bhuyan et al., 2019). The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, which reached us in the midst of writing this editorial just weeks before another U.S. presidential election, came to us as a blow to the solar plexus. We had not realized how much we had relied on her embattled body and the towering feminist judicial mind it housed to persist as bulwark against at least some of the rising tides of violence continuously encroaching upon our own gendered and racialized selves.
The past four years have been a time of learning for us and growth for the journal. We are grateful to have had the opportunity to put into practice our conviction that feminist—that is critical—scholarship that generate alternative forms of knowledge and contest entrenched and dominant narratives is necessary for social work (Park, Wahab, & Bhuyan, 2017). We have endeavored to create a space for more radical epistemological and methodological inquiry. We encouraged authors to develop their attention to intersectionality, deepen their understanding of feminist theories and their relationship to social work, and integrate theorized critique in all research, no matter the substantive or topical focus. Our initial fears that such an approach would further marginalize the journal (and our authors) have not materialized. As critical qualitative scholars working from a poststructuralist lens, we had always resisted the hegemony of impact factor calculations from delimiting our own work. In our role as editors-in-chief, as well as our privileged position as tenured faculty, however, we had to acknowledge that continued increase to the journal's impact factor was important to our authors whose job security and career prospects were hitched to such metrics that evaluate the “quality” of the journals in which they publish (Bhuyan et al., 2020). It matters to us a great deal, therefore, that we have been able to create a space for more theoretically engaged and critical scholarship, and our submission rates and impact factor have also increased.
As the events of the past year forcibly remind us, the urgency for feminist struggles continue: reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, migrant rights, gender parity, racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, end of colonial occupations, and so much more remain still out of reach. It is a simple fact that 34 years after its creation, Affilia remains still the only platform dedicated to feminist social work scholarship. One of the many ways that the ongoing need for its work was brought home to us was the frustratingly time- and energy-wasting “Sokal Squared hoax,” the unethical project of deceit and dissimulation engineered to discredit critical race and gender scholarship which targeted Affilia in late 2018. While this attack on our collective work ultimately strengthened rather than dampened our resolve to stay the course (Park et al., 2019), it created countless hours of additional unpaid labor which could have been so much better spent on advancing, rather than defending, its work.
Our experience with groups of emerging researchers at the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) Conference counterbalanced that of the hoax but also underscored for us the importance of the work of Affilia. At SSWR, for the past two years, a handful of Affilia editors has delivered methodology workshops covering a range of critical feminist methods and approaches to social work research (Beltrán, 2019). While feminist scholarship covers vast and contested theoretical and methodological landscapes, a core theme that unites all feminist research and writing, in our view, is a politic of resistance. We believe, as bell hooks (1984) taught us, that research and scholarship that challenge the center while claiming and reclaiming the margins is an urgent task for social work, especially in the current political tumult and climate of fear. While we cannot ever discount the complicity of both social work and feminisms in systems of control and oppression, we have remained steadfast in our conviction that feminist social work’s embrace of contestation grounded in praxis and social justice provides inspiration and technologies for repurposing unjust systems toward our decolonizing and liberatory desires (Wahab et al., 2018).
We suspected that our SSWR sessions would be attended by a scattering of like-minded scholars and some beginning qualitative researchers curious about “alternative” paths to scholarship. We had not imagined so many would come. Nor had we anticipated, though it seems obvious in hindsight, that the bulk of them would be doctoral students and junior faculty with racialized or otherwise marginalized identities hungry for access—in training and mentorship, and support and validation—to approaches and methodologies grounded in epistemologies that did not negate their experiences of being in the world and held some promise of accountability to the communities in and for which they worked. They sought ways of generating knowledge that did not compromise and continuously erode the politics of resistance that had brought them to social work and research in the first place.
The indelible impression we were left with at the close of these sessions was that many more emerging researchers than we had imagined yearned to learn and use critical methodologies. Far too many, however, did not find their institutions supportive of their attempts to do so. The student attendees lamented the lack of attention to critical research methodologies, and approaches in their doctoral education as did the junior faculty the lack of institutional legitimation for their attempts to do such research. Both noted the dearth of faculty mentors who could provide support and guidance; the programs and structures in which the participants were embedded did not have the capacity within their institutions to fill this gap, even if such a gap was acknowledged. Whether through the sheer lack of opportunity or explicit discouragement, consequently, students and junior faculty were dissuaded from engaging with such “alternative” methods and approaches.
In the current sociopolitical moment, when the recognition of systemic inequality, the need for structural transformation, and the call to amplify the voices and perspectives of black, Indigenous, and people of color seem to be on every academic’s lips, we can perhaps hope that our attendees’ calls for real access to critical scholarship will finally be realized. We know, however, that social work’s capacity for teaching and supporting the doing of critical scholarship is stymied by an entire ecosystem of legitimacy and validation built upon a profoundly colonial epistemology nested within a neoliberal economy (Park, Bhuyan, & Wahab, 2017). The economic structure of so many social work schools and departments in the United States is predicated upon a faculty who obtain external funding with the attendant administrative costs that prop up departmental budgets, pay faculty salaries, and fund doctoral student scholarships. Adjudications for promotion and tenure are, unsurprisingly, increasingly tied to the heft of such funding portfolios. This is a closed, tautological ecology that buttresses the center and further disenfranchises the margins. Because “alternative” research is far less likely to garner external funding, appointments, as well as tenure and promotion are far more difficult to attain doing such research, resulting in institutions with few permanent faculty who can teach critical methods and theories, and no options for emerging scholars to learn and do such research. If social work’s recent awakening to structural oppression is to be taken seriously, this structural/institutional/systemic barrier to doing research that challenges the center should be contested; the link between structural inequality and epistemological dominance must be recognized and addressed. Affilia is an intentionally created space to publish “alternative” scholarship. What it seeks is more scholars who can and will author such work; what so many gendered and racialized scholars seek, the SSWR sessions reminded us, are institutions that can and will support those choices.
In closing, we take the opportunity to express our gratitude to our talented editorial board and consulting editors. Special thanks are due to Associate Editors, Drs. Susan Chandler and Sheila Neysmith, whose sage counsel helped us to make better decisions and provide clearer guidance on so many manuscripts, and Editorial Assistants Jordan Alam and Brianna Suslovic, without whose technical savvy and quotidian care the journal simply could not have functioned. Finally, we welcome the incoming Editors-in-Chief, Drs. Sara Goodkind, Mimi Kim, and Jennifer Zelnick. As current members of the editorial board, they have been robustly engaged with the various operations of the journal and collectively bring decades of feminist activism, practice, research, and scholarship. We look forward to their vision and leadership for the journal. While our tenure began in the immediate aftermath of the crushing 2016 presidential election, theirs, it is our fervent hope, will begin in a brighter political setting.