Politics, preoccupations, pragmatics: a race/ethnicity redux for social work research

ABSTRACT

The need for sustained scholarly analysis and knowledge building on issues of race and ethnicity in social work research is as compelling as ever given the intensification of global racial inequalities, issues associated with the ‘migrant crisis’, the spread of populist racialised political discourse and the ongoing downward pressure of neo-liberal imperatives. This field of research has been subject to deep conceptual shifts, competing theoretical orientations, new methodological trajectories, ambivalence and, some say, conspicuous attrition. In this article, I draw on multi-disciplinary and cross-national theorising to examine shifts in the contemporary context of ‘race/ethnicity’ research (the politics); consider the evidence on current trends and tendencies in the content of social work research (preoccupations) and examine some of the challenges of race/ethnicity (R/E) scholarship, and of ensuring attention to these dimensions in social work research (pragmatics). In these terms, I seek to ask critical questions of the social work research enterprise and its responsibilities in relation to human rights and social justice. I set out a call to the European academy and to the responsibilities of all social work researchers, editors, reviewers and knowledge builders, resurrecting Boushel’s searching question: ‘What kind of people are we?’.

KEYWORDS:

• Race/ethnicity
• social work research

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Dr Meike Schrooten for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Charlotte Williams OBE, is Honorary Professor in the School of History, Philosophy and Social Sciences, Bangor University, Wales.

Notes

1 The term ‘race’ is highly contested in the European context and is used here as a socially constructed category not to suggest the existence of biologically distinct races. I use the term R/E throughout to denote scholarship focussed on or including attention to racialized minorities and/or minority ethnic groups. For debate on this as a field of study see, for example, Winant (2015).

2 Key note at the European Social Work Research Conference, Leuven 2019.