Decolonizing Social Work

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.

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

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

Anna-Lisa Klages is a Research Associate and PhD fellow at BayWISS Academic Forum ‘Social Change’ in affiliation with LMU Munich, Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany.

Sara Rodríguez Lugo is a student assistant, Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany.