ABSTRACT
This article concerns itself with the events surrounding the ‘Americanisation’ of social work education in India and aims to evaluate if this was an outcome of entanglements with imperialism—cultural, professional or moral. It looks at actors, within and beyond academic spaces, including missionaries and cold war politics as key contours in organizing the ‘American’ turn in social work education in India. Subsequent to the import of the ‘modern social work’ discipline to India, the episteme of social work was inferred to be more clinicalized and neo-liberal in its approach to social development. The article is a humble effort to understand if this ‘technology transfer’ of social work education, its models and methods, was a plain and simple emancipatory event or was also organized by the imperial interests?
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Notes
1. The rhetoric of technology transfer reflects the post world war II transfer of knowledge and methods in social work to India, essentially by the efforts of US Technical Cooperation Agreement (TCA). This has been argued as a key factor behind dominant American models in social work education in India. Chatterjee et al. (Citation2013) describe it as ‘knowledge transfer from the rich countries to the poor countries’ which in social work included ‘efforts of community organization, community development, and social development’. They find this idea crucial for the ‘direct practice’.
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Abhijeet Mishra
Abhijeet Mishra holds MA in Social Work and MPhil in Sociology from the Universities of Delhi and Hyderabad respectively.