Focussing on the epistemic – the way in which knowledge is understood,
constructed,
transmitted and used – this book shows the way social work
knowledge has been constructed from within a white western paradigm, and
the need for a critique of whiteness within social work at this epistemic level.
Social work, emerging from the western Enlightenment world, has privileged
white western knowledge in ways that have been, until recently, largely unexamined
within its professional discourse. This imposition of white western
ways of knowing has led to a corresponding marginalisation of other forms
of knowledge. Drawing on views from social workers from Asia, the Pacific
region, Africa, Australia and Latin America, this book also includes a glossary
of over 40 commonly used social work terms, which are listed with their epistemological
assumptions identified. Opening up a debate about the received
wisdom of much social work language as well as challenging the epistemological
assumptions behind conventional social work practice, this book will be
of interest to all scholars and students of social work as well as practitioners
seeking
to develop genuinely decolonised forms of practice.
Sonia Tascón is a Lecturer in Social Work at Western Sydney University. A descendant of the Chilean Indigenous Mapuche Nation, a fact she discovered later in life, she is now committed to understanding and incorporating her indigeneity into her self-identification. Her lengthy academic career has almost completely focused on issues of race, whiteness, diaspora, and refugee and migrant rights. As a social work/ human rights practitioner her practice incorporated Indigenous health, youth and child mental health, as well as child protection, always with a concern for race as a dimension of inequality. In her later academic life, she took a turn towards the creative visual arts, always maintaining a race analysis and focus on communities as sources of sustenance. Her current interest lies on disrupting white epistemologies in social work and beyond, as a foundational means of achieving decolonisation.
Jim Ife is Professor of Social Work at Western Sydney University. He has previously been Professor of Social Work and Social Policy at The University of Western Australia and at Curtin University, and was Head of the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin, where is he Emeritus Professor. He has written extensively in the areas of community development, social work and human rights, and is the author of Community Development (Cambridge University Press, latest edition 2016), Human Rights and Social Work (Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition 2013), Human Rights from Below (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Rethinking Social Work (Pearson, 1997). He is also co-editor of Radicals in Australian Social Work: Stories of Life-Long Activism (Conor Court, 2017).
