Decolonizing Social Work: From Theory to Transformative Practice - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1350366471 ISBN 13: 9781350366473

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026

Synopsis

This open access edited collection provides a long-overdue examination of a practice that is continuously involved in managing, regulating, and subordinating individuals and communities. While it is well established that neoliberal systems of population management are designed to target the “constructed other,” there is considerably less research examining how social work in particular interacts with the vestiges of colonialism to further this practice. Gathering social work scholars and practitioners from around the world, this collection offers a geographically diverse array of ambitious and insightful theoretical, conceptual, and practical discussions of how social work can perpetuate the afterlives of colonialism and of how this can be reversed. In so doing, this book not only provides in-depth, empirically grounded critiques of – and antidotes to – various policies for managing people at the margins of society, it also makes a compelling case for always keeping the complexity of colonial continuity in conversation with neoliberal systems of governance. As these chapters show, it is only by keeping the full complexity of such confluences in mind that social inequality and institutional racism can be understood and that possibilities for change can emerge. For its fundamental contributions to the literature on postcolonial social work, this is essential reading for social work researchers and postgraduates; and for its plainspoken tone and practical recommendations, it is a go-to source for social work practitioners eager to align their own everyday work with the demands of global justice. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

About this title

About the Authors

Tanja Kleibl is Professor for Social Work, Migration and Diversity at University of Applied Sciences Wurzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany. She is also the author of Decolonizing Civil Society in Mozambique (Zed Books, 2021).

Robel Abay is guest professor of participatory approaches in social and health sciences at Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin.

Anna-Lisa Klages is a research associate and PhD fellow at the BayWISS Academic Forum “Social Change” at the University of Applied Sciences Wurzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany, in affiliation with LMU Munich.

Sara Rodríguez Lugo is a student assistant at the University of Applied Sciences, Wurzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350366471
• ISBN 13: 9781350366473
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 238
• Editor: Kleibl Tanja