Transnational Solidarity in Rough Times: Documenting and Engaging for Peace

Abstract

Social work war studies that incorporate critical theory, including feminist, disability and crip studies, and postcolonial approaches, can be used to respond to the needs of people living through genocide, domicide, ecocide, and scholasticide, and for advocacy of human dignity regardless of state and ethnic affiliation, and thus for peace worldwide. The first case study presents a thematic analysis of the war memories of social work educators and practitioners living in Ukraine and outside the war zone. Oral history, a fundamental method of critical social work research, epistemological reflexivity, and epistemic flexibility to understand the experience of the other(s), began with war stories collected by early Greek historians. The latest memoirs related to the invasion of Ukraine reveal the dichotomy between life-threatening circumstances on the one hand and the necessity of social work educators and practitioners to continue ordinary life on the other; the need for institutional and emotional support; and the recognition that war narrows the perception of human diversity and regiments people into binary identities of gender and singular identity positions regarding ethnicity. The second case study presents a unique example of transnational solidarity and support meetings with social work teachers and practitioners during wartime. From the onset of the war, transnational solidarity was a resistance to the isolation of social work colleagues due to the war and served as a force of connectedness in a time of human suffering and division. The Global Principle of Social Work Ethics (9.3) are used to show complexities and ambivalences of the dangerous peace and the need for situated ethics and standpoints concerning war and peace.