Critical Feminism Under Critical Conditions: Violence,Silence,and Resistance

On June 28, 2023, a young man entered a classroom at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He asked some of the students and the professor what class was being taught. When students confirmed that the course was on the philosophy of gender, he drew two knives and proceeded to attack the professor and two students who tried to intervene (Friesen et al., 2023; MacDonald & Kolentsis, 2023). Fortunately, the professor and students recovered from their injuries.

Across postsecondary contexts, critical feminist scholars have had to contend with threats of escalating hate and violence. Some threats arrive in the form of classroom violence, as was the case at the University of Waterloo. Some come from anonymous or difficult-to-trace individuals and groups on social media and other online spaces. Others arrive in the form of increased state-based surveillance of classroom conversations, and legislation barring the teaching of critical theories and topics. At the time of writing, 40 bills across the United States target diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions. The state of Florida goes further to prohibit the use of state dollars for “political or social activism” (Alonso, 2023).

Increasingly, critical feminist educators work alongside the fear that anyone in a classroom, conference, or educational discussion board could report upon their conversations and activities in ways that mobilize violence, state surveillance, institutional censure, or media outcry. Social work educators are not immune, as shown by a New York Times op-ed column criticizing antioppressive education at the Columbia University School of Social Work (Paul, 2023).

Definitions of what constitutes hate and violence on campus have become even thornier as people around the world grapple with horrific events in Israel and Palestine where the death toll rises and a humanitarian crisis intensifies as we write. Universities are being called upon to address antisemitism and Islamophobia and to develop policies on student and faculty activism. However, some voices have refurbished the language of “campus hate” to narrowly target faculty and students who have expressed pro-Palestinian views or supported the right of others to advocate against occupation and settler-colonialism. Discussions of what forms of speech universities should discipline appeared front-and-center in hearings on university campuses at the United States Congress in December 2023; two female university presidents were forced to resign shortly afterward, including the first Black woman to be president of Harvard University (Zernike, 2024).

Instead of protecting academic activities from violence and state interference, accusations of “hate” are now being mobilized to shut them down. Faculty across many campuses have been formally and informally cautioned against directly engaging in discussions about Palestine. In our own scholarly community, Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, one of the authors of a 2022 Affilia article “Feminist except for Palestine: Where are critical feminist social workers on Palestine?” has faced institutional censure, suspension, and threats of violence due to signing a petition for a ceasefire in Gaza (American Anthropological Association, 2023). The threats are not distant, nor are they hypothetical.

It is certainly a tough time to do critical feminist scholarship in social work, which is why such scholarship is so very necessary. As a new editorial leadership team, we are humbled by the rich legacy of thought that offers both inspiration and counsel to those striving to do liberatory work in turbulent times. We look back to the words of the brilliant Audre Lorde, who once served as Affilia's poetry editor (Coss, 1995). In her famous talk, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Lorde ([1980] 2007) challenged her audience of academics to speak out even as it is dangerous to do so: “…it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth” (p. 43). Over four decades later, this call is just as urgent: what can we do to speak, create, and grow toward justice, when powerful forces are trying to convince us that safety lies in silence?

We are certainly not the first editorial leadership team at Affilia to encounter and comment on difficult times. The last two editorial leadership teams also entered their tenure grappling with what it means to do critical feminism during moments of drastic political and social upheaval (Kim et al., 2021; Park et al., 2017). Our immediate predecessors raised alarms about social work educators losing their institutional positions due to their affiliations with abolitionist movements (Zelnick et al., 2023). The editorial leadership team before them decried the confines and conservatism of academia and asked, “How might social work scholars use what we know about community organizing to create brave academic spaces and scholarship? How might we learn from brave feminist scholars who have navigated these spaces?” (Park et al., 2017). These conversations about strategies, fears, and solidarities have continued across Affilia-hosted conference roundtables, discussion circles, and webinars, and echoed through the journal's pages.

We also know that as social workers and critical feminists, we can’t limit our attention to the world of academic inquiry. Whether our practices are within the classroom or outside, this is a time of global upheaval for many social workers who work toward feminist aims of justice: economic, reproductive, racial, anticolonial, abolitionist, climate-based, and more. This is a time of intense violence and deprivation for many global communities where we practice—and also a time when people are building beautiful solidarities and subversive strategies. The writers, reviewers, and editorial board members of Affilia rely on our readers and communities to keep us accountable to the needs of the workers and communities that our articles aim to address.

One excellent example of this connection between scholars, social workers, communities, and social movements is found in the 2023 winner of the Affilia Award for Distinguished Feminist Scholarship and Praxis in Social Work, “Decolonial feminism and practices of resistance to sustain life: Experiences of women social workers implementing mental health programmes in Chile,” by Drs. Gianinna Muñoz-Arce and Mitzi Duboy-Luengo (Muñoz-Arce & Duboy-Luengo, 2023). We congratulate the authors and encourage others to read this work.

We are grateful for all these examples of engaged scholarship and welcome the ideas from our Affilia community. As we embark on our tenure as incoming editors and imagine the work ahead of us, we, Meg Gibson, Mery Diaz, and Sharvari Karandikar, will continue to ask ourselves, how can we nurture risk-taking in academia while also being responsive to the very real dangers that critical scholars face? What is the path forward for critical feminist social work? Much of what is vital for critical feminist social work remains constant: asking disruptive questions, being present in the work, attending to positionality, and building collective strategies in the face of opposition and unabashed hate (Jackson et al., 2024). Our own commitment remains steadfast: to foster a space where Affilia's writers and readers can challenge power structures, democratize knowledge, nurture scholar-activists, and reimagine futures.

In this Issue of Affilia

The authors in this issue of Affilia continue this vital tradition of brave and radical work that pushes against and problematizes taken-for-granted systems and oppressive practices. The featured In Brief article by Kristen Cheney and Karen Smith Rotabi advocates for reproductive justice through a critique of “the adoption fallacy”—the unfounded argument that people who are denied abortion access will be willing and able to consider adoption instead—and calls to “decolonize the social work profession and critically reflect on the role of reproductive policy and politics within social work” (Cheney & Rotabi, 2024). Ashley-Marie H. Daftary, Debora Ortega, Ceema Samimi, and Annahita Ball deploy critical race theory to shed light on how racial microaggressions experienced by faculty and staff in K-12 schools, particularly “pathologizing cultural values and communication styles,” maintain institutionalized racism (Daftary et al., 2024). A study by Hanna Bäckström Olofsson and Isabel Goicolea explores virtual spaces for feminist peer support in Sweden, framing them as an “arena for feminist activism” (Bäckström Olofsson & Goicolea, 2024). Fatoumata Bah and Njeri Kagotho present findings from qualitative interviews with the eldest daughters in families of first- and second-generation immigrants from Africa living in the American Midwest and explore how these young women navigate multiple responsibilities and the expectations of others (Bah & Kagotho, 2024). Meanwhile, Gina L. Fedock, Sheila Shankar, Celina Doria, and Marion Malcome urge readers to listen to women's experiences with prison-based mental health treatments, emphasizing that these treatments may be causing “mental health harm” instead of “mental health care” for incarcerated women in the United States (Fedock et al., 2024).

The current issue also includes vital contributions on intimate partner violence (IPV) that address a diverse range of issues and regions. An article by Amber Sutton highlights the work of community advocates in Alabama and shares their observation that IPV “erupted” during the global COVID-19 pandemic (Sutton, 2024). Sutton draws attention to how this pandemic and related public health measures both exacerbated women's experiences of violence and made it more difficult for workers to provide services. Qualitative research by Patrina Duhaney points our attention to Black women's motivations for participating in a Canadian study on their experiences with police in the context of IPV and, in so doing, explores strategies for increasing Black women's engagement in such research (Duhaney, 2024). An article by Claire Willey-Sthapit, Taryn Lindhorst, Susan Kemp, and Maya Magarati uses critical discourse analysis to examine 26 development research reports on domestic violence in Nepal, revealing how essentialist ideas about the local culture were constructed—and occasionally resisted—in the texts (Willey-Sthapit et al., 2024). Finally, Jenny Maturi uses a critical praxis lens to investigate the concept of “empowerment” as used and critiqued by frontline workers who support refugee and migrant women experiencing gendered violence in Queensland, Australia (Maturi, 2024).

As readers of Affilia, we hope you find this issue as thought-provoking as we do, and that it helps you in further conversations, further investigations, and further actions. We are energized by this opportunity to work with all the authors, reviewers, board members, and readers of Affilia's community. This is not just a journal. This is a space for solidarity, possibility, liberation, and radical hope. Every time we work in community to address urgent social problems, we show that how things are is simply not good enough. Every time we teach, learn, read, and write against hatred, domination, and isolation, we resist and fight back against models of education and scholarship that silence and divide. There is work to do.