The Social Work Routes podcast discussed at the European Conference on Social Work Research in Amsterdam

I have been working with producers Priscilla Osei and Smarika KC on writing about the content of the Social Work Routes podcast. At the 11th annual European Conference on Social Work Research, I presented some of the preliminary findings of our study. The presentation outlined the role of podcasts as public scholarship, arguing that one method of decolonizing social work epistemology at the intersection of activist ancestors and professional lineage could be to look to public history as a pedagogical tool in the curriculum. We further pointed out that the use of podcasts has the potential to decolonize the process of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating local knowledge of activist ancestors thus challenging the top-down approach to expert-driven epistemologies. While we are still in the midst of analyzing our data, based on student feedback we have found that the podcast introduced themes of diversity and intersectionality in Finnish classes that often have a relatively high level of cultural and ethnic homogeneity, challenging perceptions that diversity resides solely in clients. The podcasts also opened up opportunities to transmit knowledge to neurodiverse students, who found them user-friendly. We are continuing to work on this research.