Abstract
This special issue is an offspring of a collaborative project which began in 2008 among four universities in Canada, the United Kingdom and Denmark with a shared commitment to exploring issues of diversity, citizenship and internationalizing social work practices, through a Canada-European Union funded exchange of students, practitioners and faculty. Over the ensuing three years, 42 students undertook practice placements in settings addressing the needs of marginalised and social excluded people in host countries, assessed by seasoned practitioners in the field. Student-led seminars and four international conferences were held in each site, bringing together a variety of students, faculty and practitioners for rich discussions and shared analyses of experiences.
These discussions continue with further collaborations and new partnerships, and through the publication of this special edition of International Social Work. We are very pleased to be guest editing this issue, given the leadership of this journal within the international dialogue on practices of citizenship, globalization, internationalism, pedagogy, and human rights, and its record for vigilance against the slippery Western slope toward perpetuating knowledge imperialism and neo-colonialism.
As trends of global migration, disaster and uprising continue to confront the public domain, Schools of Social Work across the world continue to engage with questions of how best to educate social work students toward an analysis of oppressive practices of power as well as liberation in the lives of all people. Social work must be engaged in internationalizing practices because social issues such as HIV/AIDS, poverty, shrinking welfare and violence, among many others, transcend geographical boundaries and identity locations. Trade, travel and technology have increased flows of people and information through porous borders, and social workers are engaged on the frontlines, struggling to respond within structures and processes that often perpetuate economic and cultural privilege. This special edition of International Social Work features the scholarship of authors who address many perspectives surrounding the question, how do we educate for internationalizing social work practices? The authors anchor their responses in their experiences with social work education, practice and research, drawing on local examples as they take up questions of global relevance.
Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha’s article initiates the edition, asserting that thinking through the possibilities of internationalizing social work education must begin with a deconstruction of the neoliberal construct of citizenship, given it is the notion of citizenship upon which is built fundamental beliefs about membership and entitlements. She details a line of reasoning as follows: the provision of social work services is based upon determination of need; the determination of need rests upon the prevailing construction of rights and responsibilities afforded to a nation’s citizens. If those of us engaged in international social work education do not deconstruct the nationalist basis of social care policies, then we reinscribe differential access to them, a fundamental incongruence with our social justice mission. Moosa-Mitha provides concrete examples of how the legalist and neoliberal citizenship construction has trickle-down effects for social workers, including the dichotomizing of sites of practice as ‘here’ and ‘there’ and issues as ‘local’ or ‘international’ which again further reinscribes a hierarchy of social rights and limits social workers’ ability to work across the global divide to address social issues that transgress nation-state boundaries.
Moosa-Mitha posits the notion of transnational social work education, which opens conceptual and practical means for working fully with the migration of issues, ideas and people across arbitrary and confining borders which do not reflect the porous parameters of people’s lives today. Such a transnational focus can engage students, practitioners and faculty as socio-political actors, ready to uphold the social justice aims of social work and help to shift the static, traditional notion of citizenship to a dynamic one configured as practices of engagement.
Marjorie Johnstone and Eunjung Lee’s critical perspective on Canada’s trend toward positioning the education of international students as an economic strategy follows well on Moosa-Mitha’s examination of the construct of citizenship. Both highlight related implications of neoliberalism brought upon education. Johnstone and Lee detail the growth of an international education industry in Canada, wherein global capitalism and neoliberalism have directly shaped an agenda for recruiting international students. Specifically, the partnering of the federal government with immigration services, through which immigration processes have been streamlined to provide smooth entry for students, situates education migration as a new form of nation building.
The authors contextualize globalization – often conceptualized and discussed outside of its historicity and geopolitics – within its rightful postcolonial origins and according to its neo-imperial interests. Education has long been a means through which to colonize ‘the other’, and neo-imperialism is the basis upon which western countries recruit international students to purchase a seat in western education. The latter then generates profitable business for the host country, contributing to their knowledge imperialism and ongoing global influence, and correspondingly has an inverse effect on the capacity for the same among the sending counties. The authors detail the evidence that Canada has seized upon educational capital as a central asset. In order to commodify this asset, Canadian education has undergone a branding process in order to ensure measurable economic benefits. As a result, “social, critical and contextual knowledge as well as values of social justice and equity in the welfare state are absent in this formula for market based technocratic and instrumental knowledge”. This critique sounds a striking parallel to the concerns regarding competencies-based social work education, echoed by practitioners and academics around the world.
Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and Michael Rasell bring similar concerns about externally motivated educational policy in their article, specifically to social work education in Russia, which began only 20 years ago. Like many western countries, yet distinct in their state socialism, the Soviet government dismissed or avoided responsive care to the vulnerable and dispossessed, and perpetuated the ideology of individual pathos as the central cause for social struggle. While in the early 1990s saw the development of social work degree programmes, Iarskaia-Smirnova and Rasell are concerned that the priorities and interests in educating for the profession lead away from, rather than towards, the realities and needs in the field. The heavy state control of curriculum for universities in the country is experienced as resulting in rigid expectations, not informed by practitioners of social work, and distanced from the social justice aims of the profession. Like many academics and practitioners where the trend toward competencies-based curricular models have gained prominence, the authors are concerned that such a curricular framework does not attend to the nuances of critical reflection, ethics and practical application and instead emphasize administrative function and compartmentalization of service user needs. Even so, the authors maintain optimism for a national dialogue to grow in new directions, given their sense of a growing an alignment among those experiencing vulnerability and marginalization, practitioners working with them, and academic teaching in social work programs.
Honing in yet further on the design and content of social work programmes, Lynn Healy and Gidraph Wairire advocate for the Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development (IFSW, IASSW & ICSW, 2012) to be a foundational framework for social work education in order to advance the mutually reinforcing goals of preparing social workers to be global citizens and to positively impact social, economic and environmental change with the world’s most vulnerable populations. As foundational components of the Global Agenda commitment, the authors specifically examine use of the Millenium Devlopment Goals (MDGs) and focus on human rights and social integration, respectively, in educational programmes in Kenya and the United States. First, the authors draw a connection between the lack of official requirement for schools of social work in both countries to incorporate content on the MDGs, the lack of student and practitioner awareness of the MDGs, and the low measurable success in meeting the MDGs. Next, they raise concerns about the limited integration of human rights content as not only a aspirational but practical anchor to which social work education should be bound. Finally, examples of violent conflicts and social exclusion in both countries have illustrated for the authors how quickly social work students can become distanced from the principles and values of the profession when the students’ personal circumstances or beliefs are challenged. While the post 2015 agenda is now well into development, these cases exemplify gaps in social work education that can be filled by drawing on the materials already comprehensively developed and detailed in the Global Agenda. Their inclusion would have the multiple benefits of spreading awareness of the content and process of the Global Agenda, and developing the social work student as global citizen, which could then propel forward the massive action and advocacy required to impact global social justice.
Catherine Allensworth Hawkins and Karen Knox pick up specifically on the promise of a curriculum focus on human rights, which they argue is necessary for students to take up the globalizing perspectives required of the profession. While acknowledging the challenges to universalism, particularly given historical and contemporary patterns of western knowledge imperialism and values imposition, Hawkins and Knox posit that an integrated curriculum and attentive processes that centre human rights is necessary in social work degree programmes. They explain how material specifically addressing global communication, interconnected economies, and expanding migration can build student commitment to becoming global citizens and human rights activists. They have developed and implemented a framework for human rights leadership that emphasizes literacy/knowledge acquisition, empathy/personal investment and responsibility/action as the means through which students can sustain commitment to global issues of social justice: learning the issues builds concern for the people, which together build the drive to advocate for transformation. Classroom activities and course requirements through which students learn about, connect with, and then create interventions for issues of global humanity and disparities build complementary skills in leadership and collective action, through which transformation, both personal and project-based, can occur.
Lena Dominelli’s article brings together an integration of the principles and practices raised in the preceding papers, in her presentation of research undertaken in Sri Lanka. She begins by contextualizing the project within a critique of social work’s internationalizing practices, including the liberatory and oppressive, both within and across borders, and asserts that, given this legacy, social workers and educators must interrogate their internationalism in order to not be complicit with neocolonizing practices and the consequences that result in continued oppressive practices of power. Indeed, western cultural hegemony means that many internationalizing practices have continued colonialist trends and encouraged assimilation both within nation states and across borders.
Dominelli’s article reports on research undertaken by a university-led response team and an agency-based response team 5 years after the Tsunami in the Sri Lanka region, specifically focusing on the factors that contribute to the experience of empowering partnerships in delivering aid. The reported data provides first voice accounts of the experiences of the organization, reception, and implications of receiving aid. Those arrangements that were experienced as reciprocal, participatory and locally responsive were considered empowering for the residents, with many concrete improvements attested. Dominelli leaves us with key principles for internationalizing processes, built upon the recognition that values drive the process and outcome, particularly the degree of mutual investment and interaction among the participating groups. When humanitarian aid is shaped in partnership with recipients, it is more likely to be grounded within a commitment to capacity building beyond the immediate aftermath and developed according to geographic, linguistic and cultural specifics.
We would like to thank our colleagues for these papers, which provide us with provocation for re-thinking issues surrounding social work education for internationalizing practices with a balance of attention to the discursive and the material. The authors offer us both common threads of analysis and the conceptual space for a range of critical perspectives, suggesting there are many means through which we can indeed take up the questions posed and challenges issued. It is now up to each of us to do so.