Decolonisation and critical social work pedagogies

There is much said about social work’s complicity in state violence globally. Be it systemic intergenerational trauma resulting from ideologically driven social policy; from stolen babies in Spain and Ireland, to institutional racism inherent from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa to First Nations oppression. With each exposed scandal, there is both justified outcry that a profession purporting to stand for social justice should be involved in such brutal subjugation and a reluctance or push-back to scrutinising social work as a whole. It has caused many to ask if social work, by its very nature, is the apparatus of the state of the day. If social justice statements are comforting fig leaves soothing a profession’s moral conscience, it may indeed be that social work can only truly decolonise by untying its tether to power altogether. Or is a binary view of social work as state or anti-state too simplistic? Is abolitionism a spectrum social work has always been engaged in, giving space for daily micro and macro resistances within the system? This chapter pays respect to both the labour which has gone into exposing social work’s complicity with oppression and ways in which decolonisation might be achieved. The focus herein is on social work education as a space for resistance and activism. The specific focus which follows is on the structural design of social work education as perhaps lesser explored areas of resistance – who enters social work education, who teaches, and the constructed classroom.