Travelogue - Josh

At one point when Michael Reisch spoke with our practice classes earlier this semester, he talked about how in some parts of the world social workers have been among the first to be targeted by repressive political regimes because their work is considered subversive and clearly aligned with social justice activism. I thought about something similar when we read the article Poverty through the lens of economic rights earlier this semester. In that article, the portrayal of Chilean ollas comunes and social workers whose practice is closely bound to social movements was hugely inspiring to me. I felt similarly reading the discussion of participatory action research and moving from charity to solidarity in Cows for campesinos; and reading the vignettes about acting on local knowledge and resisting imposed top-down agendas in Australia in Community development and a postmodernism of resistance.

Okay, so what does this have to do with the mapping project? For me, it comes back to keeping a big-picture perspective about what kinds of change social work is capable of supporting and enacting. My fear is that we limit our sense of what is possible, in part, because of the historical context in which we are becoming social workers. As I have time and time again over the last year, I return to the words of Harry Specht and Mark Courtney in their book Unfaithful Angels. They state: "Today, a significant proportion of social workers are practicing psychotherapy, and doing so privately, with a primarily middle-class, professional, Caucasian clientele...The poor have not gone away; there are more of them than at any time in recent memory...[If these trends continue] the 'social' in social work may be rendered meaningless" (Specht and Courtney, 1994, x-xi).

With all this in mind, it inspires me to no end to read the examples of social workers (broadly defined) internationally who are committed to profound societal change and see their work as connected to larger social movements. I started by mapping two organizations I had the privilege of supporting while I was in Guatemala: UDEFEGUA and ECAP. Both organizations do direct service and psychosocial support work for survivors of violence, and both are intimately bound to powerful social justice movements that strive to end such violence. I loved learning from the map about organizations as diverse as the Self-Employed Women's Association, Mouvman Peyizan Papay, and Abahlali baseMjondolo, all of which combine direct service work with systems-level work.   

I am focusing here on social workers and social work organizations tied to larger social movements not because they are the only ones doing important work. Rather, I want to recognize trends in U.S. social work during what appears to be a very conservative moment in our profession's history, so as to not let those trends limit the kinds of work and change we commit ourselves to.