Closings,crossings,and complications: The fluidity of borders and boundaries in qualitative social work

If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it has affirmed global interconnectedness and shone a spotlight on already existing inequalities within and across environments. In part it has done this by revealing usually taken-for-granted boundaries, either blurring them or intensifying their rigidity. Social work scholars and practitioners have had to adapt by embracing fluidity or creatively transcending restrictions.

For the authors whose essays appear in this section, the Covid-19 pandemic led them to confront new and shifting borders of many types. They range from the need to cross the digital divide by delivering mental healthcare via telehealth (Chan and Du, 2021) to grappling with national border shutdowns or lockdowns putting precariously employed migrants at further risk (Jara-Labarthé and Cisneros-Puebla, 2021). Covid-19 has challenged “business as usual” demanding new flexibility and fluidity in response.

The collection of essays seems to suggest variations on adaptations. For example, when the pandemic halted international travel and disrupted working norms, social work researchers needed to find ways to create virtual bridges to maintain international partnerships. They needed to modify their research designs to meet the needs of residents in community-based projects (Sørly et al., 2021). Similarly, they needed to draw on the fluidity of their professional identities to adjust to service-delivery under crisis (Chan and Du, 2021). Two scholars from neighboring countries—both hard hit by Covid-19—jointly reflect on what they were teaching and what their students were learning, demonstrating a fluidity of boundaries, personal, geo-political, and educational (Cabiati and Gómez-Ciriano, 2021). Authors advocate re-envisioning social work to better weather storms in the future. We have the opportunity to transform the lessons learned in a global emergency by flexibly re-imagining a culture of care for the most vulnerable (Sim, 2021).

The pieces in this section speak to the complexity of crossing these various borders. According to the Merriam-Webster English dictionary, a border as a noun is 1) the part of edge of a surface or area that forms its outer boundary, or 2) the line, limit, or delimiting geographic feature that separates one country, state, province, etc., from another. Borders are distinct places where limits are drawn, and boundaries are set. But during the pandemic, these borders and boundaries have been both hardened and softened. They have hardened across nation-states with borders closing to control the spread of Covid-19 and impeding, for example, migrants and immigrants from returning to their families (Jara-Labarthé and Cisneros-Puebla, 2021; Saldanha, 2021). Borders have also softened as social workers and scholars have had to contend with the blurring of boundaries between home and work environments, teaching and learning, and in practice, where services and therapies were provided remotely. Taken together the pandemic has exposed and troubled these boundaries while inviting creative adaptation to them.