Editorial –Forging a New Chapter: Message from the New Editor-In-Chief

Abstract

It is my great privilege to be writing my first editorial for Smith College Studies in Social Work (“Smith Studies”) as the journal’s new Editor-in-Chief. I would like to express much gratitude to the outgoing co-editors, Drs. Marianne Yoshioka and Marsha Pruett. Under their leadership, Smith Studies, previously known as a journal with a psychoanalytic/psychodynamic orientation, has expanded its scope and aims and become a forum for a wider range of theoretical and empirical knowledge and practice of clinical social work. It is impossible to write about Smith Studies without considering its relationship with Smith College School for Social Work (SSW). As the oldest clinical social work program in the country, Smith Psychiatric Training School was established in 1918 to help treat trauma among World War I veterans. Smith SSW has been since leading the discipline of clinical social work and remains today as a premier graduate school of social work with a sole focus on clinical practice education. Launched as one of the first social work journals in 1930, Smith Studies has served as a scholarly home not only for Smith SSW faculty but also other practitioners and scholars in a wider social work arena. The journal has published a number of historically prominent, seminal articles that shaped the theory and practice of clinical social work for nearly a century. Published on a range of topics from therapeutic relationship, transference and countertransference, the role of culture, clinical supervision to social and policy contexts that impact clinical practice, Smith Studies has long played a significant role in the clinical social work communities. More recently, the journal has led important dialogs about the intersection between theory, research, and practice, articulating and examining elements of culturally relevant, theoretically and empirically grounded clinical practice. So, what is next for Smith Studies? I am deeply honored and humbled to take on the role of the editor-in-chief to further the journal’s mission, which is to advance and transform knowledge and practice of clinical social work in times of unrest and uncertainty. This new appointment comes in such a critical time for the profession of social work. The racial unrest and reckoning during the last few years precipitated an important movement in social work, in which our leaders have come to terms with and apologized for social work’s problematic (historical and ongoing) involvement with racist and colonial projects. From cultural genocide of Indigenous people, internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, to racist child protection practice, we as a profession are in an early phase of SMITH COLLEGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL WORK 2023, VOL. 93, NO. 1, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2217738