Claiming and Expanding Social Work Knowledge in the International Space

It is good to be back in the office after the events of the past year have kept many of us away from our workspaces, colleagues, and the tools of our trades. When I open my office door, I see shelves upon shelves of books dating back to the very first days of my social work academic career, and even before then, back through the years of practice and years before that as a student. I have been a member of the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) since my student days, which means I have accumulated three decades plus worth of Australian Social Work (ASW) hard copy journals. Minus those that have been “borrowed” over time by students and colleagues, I have a close to full collection. I admit to the odd nightmare of an industrial bin being brought to our campus, and me coming to work one day to find all my books and journals gone, deemed a health or safety hazard. I often ask myself why I am so attached to these books and journals and realise that they hold the source of knowledge about our profession, the history, and the critical developments over time that are recorded in multiple pages. The knowledge history has been built steadily by social workers who have taken the time to document what they have seen and heard, both through formally designed research and less formal reflections on practice (see He [2021], where she reflects on the COVID-19 experience in China). Social work in more developed countries has paved the way for growth in countries that have traditionally relied on less professionalised ways of providing assistance to those in need. Trevithick (2021) categorised knowledge into theoretical, factual, and practice knowledge allowing us to interrogate how we acquire knowledge and what form the knowledge takes. I recall one of my early lecturers reminding us that a social worker is nothing without a curious mind. When we ask questions, we have ways of exploring answers, in the form of research and evaluation. When we want to know why humans behave in the ways that they do, we have observations and assessments to help form explanatory theories. As we generate research, develop new theoretical understandings, produce models and new approaches, expand cultural horizons, and dive deeper into what we think we know well only to find that we knew nothing, we search for ways to share the fruits of our curiosity. We move towards those places where knowledge is stored and disseminated – places like this Journal and others. We like to think that we have the world at our fingertips and that we can search out knowledge easily with advances in technology. We can watch the events of the world unfold before us through the lens of traditional and social media. However, as the world closes in with the ravages of a global pandemic, it may become harder to bear witness through international travel to the ways that social work plays its way out in different countries and cultural contexts. Our reliance then moves back to the written word in the hope that publications will provide visual impact in the mind’s eye as we immerse into the stories of research and practice. Awareness of international developments and events is so much more at the forefront of consciousness with media and journalism committed to either hiding the truth or exposing it – dependent on political will and sources of power. Social work has always been a profession that has strong global and international roots, and the connections built up over many decades between countries have enabled oppressed voices to be heard despite the efforts of governments to silence them. Social work is also a profession that has a history of bravery when it comes to reflective practice. What this means is that social work and human service academics and practitioners are prepared to explore controversial areas of interest through research that are often untouched by those in cognate disciplines. The richness of our literary history relies on this bravery, and the willingness to reach into areas of practice that may otherwise remain hidden, particularly in countries that hold information tight. Angelina Yuen-Tsang, in her Forward to the new edition of International Social Work: Professional Action in an Interdependent World by Healy and Thomas (2021) commented: “We may have sometimes ignored the need to critically reflect on our own cultural biases and presumptions and to ensure that we respect diversity and embrace cultural differences in our professional actions and collaborations” (p. xvi). This point is worthy of consideration as we engage with the articles in this Issue of ASW.

The articles in this Issue are extremely diverse in their topics and methodologies, yet all share a common theme of deep exploration into corners of social work that contribute much to knowledge. The international flavour to this Issue is evident in the publications from Australia (Gatwiri et al., 2021; Modderman et al., 2021), New Zealand (Fox, 2021), Ghana (Adonteng-Kissi, 2021), Israel (Alhuzail & Segev, 2021), Taiwan (Lee, 2021), China (Lei et al., 2021), and Hong Kong (Leung, 2021). The research reported through these selected publications include very large-scale quantitative studies of social work student perspectives on the concept of “person-in-environment” in China (see Lei et al., 2021), to social work student attitudes towards Indigenous peoples in Taiwan (see Lee, 2021). Studies like these provide insights into ways that social work students perceive important parts of their education, and also highlight the sorts of issues that social work educators in these countries see as gaps in knowledge. In the Taiwanese study (Lee, 2021), it is of interest to read that having a friendship with an Indigenous person shapes positive attitudes much more than cultural studies within social work education. In the Chinese study (Lei et al., 2021), we learn that social work students perceive psychotherapeutic micro-practice as being the preferred way to deal with poverty. Both of these articles highlight paradoxes and indeterminate preferences of students on issues that then become important for social work education, and for our understanding of what social work students in these countries take with them into practice.

The International Federation of Social Work’s global definition of social work acknowledges the importance of indigenous knowledge, and in associated notes to the definition states: “Social work seeks to redress historic Western scientific colonialism and hegemony by listening to and learning from Indigenous peoples around the world. In this way social work knowledges will be co-created and informed by Indigenous peoples, and more appropriately practiced not only in local environments but also internationally.”¹

In particularly insightful articles about male Bedouin social workers in Israel (see Alhuzail & Segev, 2021), spirituality in Maori social work practice (see Fox, 2021), and child labour practices in Ghana (see Adonteng-Kissi, 2021), the need for understanding of local knowledge is explicitly stated. These studies, which range from small qualitative interviews with social work practitioners, to larger observational work, lend credence to the calls for decolonisation of social work curriculum (Gray et al., 2016). The article by Modderman et al. (2021) explored the understandings that transnational social workers have about First Nations child protection practices when they come from the United Kingdom and Ireland to Australia, and the critical importance of cultural humility and counter-colonial thinking. Reflections by the social workers in this study elucidate the shame felt in being “white, female, English” and asked to remove a First Nations child, and the understanding of oppression and power shown in this statement: “We’re talking about an extremely oppressed community, who face trauma after trauma after trauma from White people. And then we’re there going, with an English accent” (p. 399). The sorts of experiences that social workers face in this range of settings, and how they feel about the experiences, makes a contribution to knowledge that would otherwise stay silenced.

Two papers in this Issue have focused on studies that explore the challenges of male caregivers in Hong Kong (see Leung, 2021), and service provision for older people in urban China (see Wenyi, 2021), both discussing the concept of filial piety and the ways in which knowledge of this concept provides a foundation from which to understand the place and role of family. The Leung (2021) study draws out more nuance in relation to gender and class, using an intersectionality framework, to explore the experiences of stigma and marginalisation in the male caring role. However, there is also a finding in this study about the positive effects on families and relationships with children when men change roles within families to take on more of the caregiving of children. Of interest is a similar finding from a completely different study on the experiences of highly skilled Black African immigrants in Australia (see Gatwiri et al., 2021) where role-reversal resulted in fathers reconstructing gender identity with the finding that “these accounts run counter to some of the well-worn stereotypes of African men as being resistant to gender role changes” (p. 486). When conclusions are drawn at the end of a paper, as is the case with most articles in this Issue, that culturally-sensitive service responses and culturally-responsive pedagogical frameworks are needed in working with older people and families, in child protection, with migrants, and in social work education, it is a timely reminder that there is still such a long way to go on a global scale. Perhaps it is simply the case that with each new piece of local and native knowledge contributed by each social worker from their own part of the world, our collective understanding will continue to grow until the time comes that we stop seeing assertions that these issues have not yet been attended to.

Notes

1 https://www.ifsw.org/what-is-social-work/global-definition-of-social-work/.