Coloniality of Power and International Students Experience: What are the Ethical Responsibilities of Social Work and Human Service Educators?

ABSTRACT

This article explores theoretical responses to the living structures of dominance and subordination within modern postcolonial societies, highlighting racialised international students’ experiences within Australian universities. Drawing on coloniality of power and border thinking, it seeks to address ethical responsibilities for social work and human service educators from the author’s positioning as a non-Western immigrant ‘Other’, and experience of belonging as an educator of future social work and human service practitioners in Australia. Utilising autoethnographic and qualitative study, the article offers great insight into the systemic nature of discrimination in Australian tertiary education institutions. It suggests a need for critical, self-reflexive awareness about the legacies of colonialism and hegemonic whiteness to permeate social work and human service profession and education. This article, thus, enables decolonising minds, securing informed understanding, and initiating a shift in the way non-white (and non-Western) racialised international social work students are seen, constructed, and understood in contemporary Australian (Western) societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Autoethnography
• coloniality of power
• border thinking
• international students
• racialisation
• social work and human services ethics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Hyacinth Udah is a Lecturer in Social Work and Human Services at the James Cook University. He holds Doctorate and Master’s Degrees in Social Work from Griffith University, and the Australian Catholic University respectively. He also has a First-Class Honours Degree in Theology and Philosophy. His doctoral study explored the African immigrant experiences, and his recent research publications are extending his interests in immigrant experiences, coloniality and decoloniality, community development, mental health and well-being, social work ethics, values, education, research and practice.

Notes

1 Dirlik (2003) uses the concept of ‘global modernity’ to refer to the contemporary condition of modernity or to describe the contemporary world. Global modernity is intended as a concept to overcome a teleological bias in the term globalisation, which suggests progress toward global unity and homogeneity (Dirlik 2003).

2 The phrase, Global South, refers broadly to the regions of, or people from, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. It is one of a family of terms, including ‘Third World’ and ‘Periphery,’ that denote regions or people outside Europe and North America, mostly (though not all) low-income and often politically or culturally marginalised. It marks a shift from a focus on development or cultural difference toward an emphasis on geopolitical power relations (Dados and Connell 2012, 12). As Dados and Connell (2012, 13) explain, the term Global South, ‘references an entire history of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and differential economic and social change’ through which large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy, and access to resources are maintained.