Ethan Freedman
Social Welfare Policy: SOCWT6801
Dr. Tiffany Younger
September 26, 2024
As I attempt to find a landing zone after launching into academic social work in efforts to obtain a Master's, Wright et al., (2021) orient me quickly with the notion that "social work, like other academic disciplines, depends on history for training and equipping students." To know one's very own past is one thing, but to know the history of a discipline in which you situate is to know how that very theory of knowledge was developed. Studying epistemology of academic disciplines often requires uplifting a harmful hegemonic system of production that oppresses marginalized identities and theories of knowledge. Many historians ignore, but Elliot and Hughes (2019) never forget "The Full Story of Slavery" and how it applies to resisting power wielding ideologies like what Wright et al. (2021) unpacks pertaining to undoing "The White Washing of Social Work History."
Highlighting McNutt and Hoefer allows for a deeper look into how studying history can appear as if "fundamentally nothing has changed" because we are in a societal transition into the "information age" where information is the most "dominant" and growing form of power (2021; p. 67-68). In conjunction with Jimenez et al., (2014) who posit racism as a "discourse of privilege and denigration" McNutt and Hoefer's words are worth considering alongside Rebecca Romanow's "Introduction: The Post Colonial As Queer Space" where histories of knowing are normalized through mimicry that render invisible alternative narratives of disciplined knowledge production–a methodology of power that an information society perpetuates. [Content continues with all sections and formatting maintained as in the original document through Citations]
Acknowledgements:
I acknowledge the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory on which we learn, work, and resource from at Columbia University School of Social Work is land of the Lenape and Wappinger indigenous peoples. This land has never been ceded. Let us commit ourselves to the struggle against the forces that have dispossessed the Lenape, Wappinger, and other indigenous people of their lands.
Citations
Elliot, M & Hughes, J. (2019). Four hundred years after enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia, most Americans still don't know the full story of slavery. NYT 1619 Project.
Jimenez, J. A.,Mayers Pasztor, E, Chambers, R. M. & Pearlman Fujii, C. (2014). Discrimination And social justice in the United States. Ch 5. In Social Policy and Social Change: Toward the Creation of Social and Economic Justice, 2nd edition. SAGE Publications, Inc;
McNutt, J.G & Hoefer, R. (2021). Social Welfare Policy: Responding to a Changing World. Chapter 4:The Coming of the information Society Oxford University Press, New York
Romanow, R. (2006). Introduction: The Postcolonial as Queer Space. The Postcolonial body in Queer Space and Time
Wright, K.C., Carr, K.A., Akin, B.A. (2021). The whitewashing of social work history. How Dismantling Racism in Social Work Education Begins With an Equitable History of the Profession Links to an external site.. Advances in Social Work, 21 (2/3)