New article on decolonizing social work ancestry

The Social Work Routes Podcast has inspired me to think more about how to decolonize our single story narratives of social work history. This article explores how social work shapes its professional identity and ways of knowing by centering the role of canonical founders in the curriculum. The global social work origin story often centers on Anglo-American ancestors so one way of decolonizing social work ways of knowing could be to look to public history as a learning tool. The article concludes by discussing how podcasts like the Social Work Routes Podcast has the potential to decolonize the process of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating local knowledge of ancestors thus challenging the top-down approaches to knowing.

The article, Reimagining Social Work Ancestry: Toward Epistemic Decolonization, has just been published open access. It was a joy to work with the journal, Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work, which produces strong and critical research on a variety of topics in feminist inquiry in social work.