A. Goulden, S. Kattari, E. Slayter, Sarah E. Norris
{"title":"‘Disability Is an Art. It's an Ingenious Way to Live.’: Integrating Disability Justice Principles and Critical Feminisms in Social Work to Promote Inclusion and Anti-Ableism in Professional Praxis","authors":"A. Goulden, S. Kattari, E. Slayter, Sarah E. Norris","doi":"10.1177/08861099231188733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099231188733","url":null,"abstract":"Disability communities engaged with social work recognize how critical feminist inquiry and disability justice principles often overlap to promote anti-ableist theorizing, research, practice, and education. Both the feminist scholarship and the disability justice movement center the voices and perspectives of those most excluded, reflecting the intersectional experiences of disability communities in social work. In this brief, we draw on significant events, such as the impact of climate change and criminal legal systems on disabled people, to map connections between critical feminisms, disability justice principles, and social work values. In re-imagining disability justice as a form of critical feminism, we highlight parallels in their guiding principles and explore how their multi-issue frameworks interrogate the same systems of power and oppression. Through this re-envisioning, we build upon the knowledge offered by intersectional disability communities that center interdependence as practices of survival and resistance. The authors suggest that social workers engaged with principles of disability justice and critical feminisms would do well to consider interdependence, collective care, and mutual aid as pathways toward inclusive and anti-ableist professional praxis.","PeriodicalId":47277,"journal":{"name":"Affilia-Feminist Inquiry in Social Work","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44005914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fostering Change: Black Women's Motivations for Participating in Intimate Partner Violence Research","authors":"Patrina Duhaney","doi":"10.1177/08861099231187861","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099231187861","url":null,"abstract":"This qualitative study was informed by critical race feminism and sought to examine Canadian Black women's motivations for participating in the research study that explored their experiences with the police in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV), and the key factors that complicated their decisions. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 25 self-identified women over the age of 18. Findings indicated that Black women's experiences of anti-Black racism and various forms of systemic barriers influenced their decisions to disclose their experiences of IPV. Key themes included the invisibility of Black women's narratives, fostering political change, and the impact of racialized and gendered insider positionality. Given these findings, positioning Black women's narratives at the centre of IPV research creates opportunities for Black women to share their experiences of IPV, recognizes them as experts of their own experiences, identifies their differential experiences accessing services and supports and the barriers that impact their participation in research studies. The study provides strategies on how to increase Black women's participation and engagement in IPV research.","PeriodicalId":47277,"journal":{"name":"Affilia-Feminist Inquiry in Social Work","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49046261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisiting Empowerment Through Critical Praxis: Perspectives of Front-Line Workers Supporting Refugee Women Experiencing Gendered Violence in Australia","authors":"Jenny Maturi","doi":"10.1177/08861099231186199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099231186199","url":null,"abstract":"This article revisits the concept of empowerment that has underpinned the global movement to address gendered violence. Using a critical praxis lens, the article explores different understandings of empowerment that arose in interviews with front-line domestic violence workers who support refugee and migrant women experiencing gendered violence in Queensland, Australia. Two-thirds of the participants are from refugee and migrant backgrounds themselves. The findings reflect the shift in the service sector from more macro understandings of empowerment, grounded in feminist activism, to more micro understandings. In a context of neoliberal, bureaucratic service delivery, and limited means to address gendered violence that focus on women leaving and legal interventions, empowerment is sometimes viewed in individualistic, therapeutic terms of self-help. There is evidence that domestic violence services, founded on theories of empowerment, are now implicated in the surveillance and risk tracking role of social work as a profession, which has implications for survivor centeredness, agency, and equal participation. However, there is also evidence that front-line workers are aware of structural failings and questioning individualistic conceptions of empowerment amid broader concerns of social justice. Empowerment is viewed as transformative, with possibilities for more collective models aimed at addressing social justice. Outlining implications for feminist scholarship and practice, I suggest empowerment might be revisited by considering the differences between and within groups; structural violence and the consequences of interventions for marginalized groups; collective strategies aimed at broader structural change, such as poverty and race; and by strengthening the capacity of communities to respond to violence.","PeriodicalId":47277,"journal":{"name":"Affilia-Feminist Inquiry in Social Work","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42647111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fat Liberation: How Social Workers Can Incorporate Fat Activism to Promote Care and Justice","authors":"Brianna L. Sorensen, Amy Krings","doi":"10.1177/08861099231183672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099231183672","url":null,"abstract":"Despite serious health and mental health problems associated with weight stigma and dieting, many health providers consider intentional weight loss to be a positive pro-health intervention. Alternatively, the fat activist movement challenges weight prejudice and advocates for the equitable treatment of individuals with diverse body types. Inspired by the work of fat activists, this article encourages social work educators and practitioners to critically deconstruct anti-fat social norms and to integrate body-positive interventions within micro, mezzo, and macro practice. Fat activism complements critical feminist, queer, and disability justice frameworks that are relevant to this special issue on critical feminist inquiry.","PeriodicalId":47277,"journal":{"name":"Affilia-Feminist Inquiry in Social Work","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42529183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Expected to Work for Free: Social Work's Complicity in its Own Devaluation","authors":"Erin D. Carreon","doi":"10.1177/08861099231185331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099231185331","url":null,"abstract":"By reviewing the historical gender, race, and class-based devaluation of community and social service work, this in-brief article reveals how the profession of social work continues to contribute to this devaluation through expectations for unremunerated work. The profession communicates these expectations through the Code of Ethics, unpaid student field placements, and managerialist workplace stratification. Social work professional, educational, and employing organizations have a responsibility to demonstrate the value of social service workers and the communities they serve by eliminating expectations for unpaid labor, encouraging staff to track and report unpaid hours, and supporting the organizing efforts of the social service workforce.","PeriodicalId":47277,"journal":{"name":"Affilia-Feminist Inquiry in Social Work","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48771047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sara Goodkind, J. Zelnick, Mimi E. Kim, Sam Harrell
{"title":"Caught in the Neoliberal Churn: Pushing Back Against “Productivity” as a Measure of Impact","authors":"Sara Goodkind, J. Zelnick, Mimi E. Kim, Sam Harrell","doi":"10.1177/08861099231185198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099231185198","url":null,"abstract":"As editors of Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work since December 2020, we have been caught up in the whirlwind of political uprisings, cataclysmic weather events, global pandemic(s), and technological changes in the very act of writing that alter the conditions of academic scholarship at a temporal pace not meant for the bounds of human perception. We have also been subject to the clash between our commitment to political integrity and the capitalist logic of commercial publishing in an era of tectonic shifts in the publishing industry. These worlds intersect with our roles as workers in our respective institutions of higher education —also subject to these same external events and structural changes. Indeed, the neoliberal university has been a reality for decades (Hanesworth, 2017). Occupational precarity, especially for contract employees who increasingly make up the academic workforce; increased expectations for teaching, service, and research; and both flexibility and speed-up in teaching through a new mix of online, in-person, and hybrid teaching options had already been a core part of our experience in the academic world before March 2020. One’s vulnerability to hazardous conditions had already been shaped by race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, first language, and immigration status. Yet this historical moment seems to have intensified dynamics driven into overdrive by a knotty web of white supremacy, neoliberal capitalism, and patriarchy. Heightened vulnerabilities and an eroding capacity to withstand unrelenting changes and acceleration have occupied many pages of journals, including ours (Kim et al., 2021). Critical feminist research showed us how the pandemic disproportionately threatened the lives and well-being of Latinx immigrants (Cross & Gonzalez Benson, 2021), Latina immigrants (Cleaveland & Waslin, 2021), sex workers (Bromfield et al., 2021), intimate partner violence survivors (Heward-Belle et al., 2022), student mothers (LaBrenz et al., 2023), trafficking survivors (Namy et al., 2023), and anti-violence workers (Welch & Schwarz, 2023). Social work scholars like Stephanie Lechuga-Peña (2022) showed us how pandemic conditions disproportionately impacted the “productivity” of pre-tenure BIPOC junior women faculty. And scholars like Ahluwalia-Cameron (2022) and Liegghio and Caragata (2021) showed us how they were adapting to these unprecedented times. These are not siloed experiences. Many of us, including those who are academic scholars, teachers, social work practitioners, students, and service users have faced the squeeze on our life force and have suffered real casualties from these many-sided assaults. Within the social work academy, we have witnessed the ongoing tension between pressure to seek legitimacy through post-positivist, “scientific” epistemologies and methodologies and our ethical commitments to research that questions dominant paradigms and aims to dismantle systems of oppression. We are troubled by dete","PeriodicalId":47277,"journal":{"name":"Affilia-Feminist Inquiry in Social Work","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43231354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Becoming Black Womxn Through Embodied Inquiry","authors":"E. Alexander","doi":"10.1177/08861099231180163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099231180163","url":null,"abstract":"In this conceptual piece, I use a framework of embodiment to argue for approaches to inquiry that are better suited to engage and amplify Black womxn's knowledges in social work than are more popular social sciences methods. I also relate embodiment to several epistemic frames, and warn against disembodiment through more popular methods. Finally, I present three embodied research approaches that align with feminist social work principles. Throughout the piece, I reference works that explore feminist and embodied practices while centering Black womxn. I also frame discussion through my own embodiment as a Black femme scholar and practitioner, and embodiment and its potential in inquiries through a Black feminist tradition. Embodiment has been a framework of feminist scholarship for decades, broadly defined as living out knowledge through the body and/or in its environments through a process of becoming. Scholars in this school of thought account for their and participants’ emotions and dispositions as part of how knowledge is lived, while treating the body as a text to be read.","PeriodicalId":47277,"journal":{"name":"Affilia-Feminist Inquiry in Social Work","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47575661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Practicing feminism for social welfare: A global perspective by Phillips, R.","authors":"Marcie Lazzari","doi":"10.1177/08861099231186203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099231186203","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47277,"journal":{"name":"Affilia-Feminist Inquiry in Social Work","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43286647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“If I Don’t Do It, No One Else Will” Narratives on the Well-Being of Sub-Saharan African Immigrant Daughters","authors":"Fatoumata Bah, Njeri Kagotho","doi":"10.1177/08861099231183667","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099231183667","url":null,"abstract":"Immigrant well-being sits at the intersections of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender. Cumulative migration stressors, poverty, and socio-cultural factors have made female immigrants of sub-Saharan African descent especially susceptible to poor psychological outcomes. Furthermore, family characteristics including birth order, family size, and interpersonal relationships are known correlates of physical and mental health functioning. And yet, African immigrants are often aggregated into larger groups, effectively masking the groups’ unique historical and cultural characteristics. This phenomenological study examined how the identity of “daughter,” birth order, and transnational experiences inform the well-being of young African women. Participants ( N = 11) who self-identified as cis-gender females were invited for two cycles of in-depth interviews. These young women contextualize their identities around family and familial obligations. They struggle with the contradictions of the parent–child relationship and credit parenting strategies they sometimes view as problematic with their career and academic drive. Feelings of being overwhelmed by familial and social expectations are countered by excitement around their emerging liberated identities. These findings point to the need for inclusive spaces which consider the multiple identities they embody.","PeriodicalId":47277,"journal":{"name":"Affilia-Feminist Inquiry in Social Work","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65344959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sisterhood at a Distance: Doing Feminist Support Work Online","authors":"Hanna Bäckström Olofsson, I. Goicolea","doi":"10.1177/08861099231181583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099231181583","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this study is to analyze the characteristics of feminist peer support in the context of online chat counseling. Based on 15 interviews with female lay supporters associated with a branch of the Swedish women's shelter movement targeting young women, we explore how the digital setting—characterized by distance and anonymity—affects the meaning and doing of feminist support. Our results show that core principles of feminist support—striving for equality and trust, the crafting of safe spaces, and sharing experiences—are all renegotiated and/or accentuated by the digital setting. The chat is experienced as enabling a more equal relationship and a high level of safety. The meaning of safety has largely shifted, however, from being associated with a feminist community to safety associated with solitude and distance. We further show a tension in the respondents’ understanding of shared experiences, stressing both the importance of situated knowledges and the value of not knowing who is seeking or offering support. By combining research and material on feminist support and online youth counseling, the article offers novel perspectives on feminist counseling and social work, the power dimensions of online counseling, and the virtual space as an arena for feminist activism.","PeriodicalId":47277,"journal":{"name":"Affilia-Feminist Inquiry in Social Work","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47895643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}