Decolonial Methodologies in Social Work: Foregrounding Pluriversalism in Teaching and Research

Decolonizing research and education means loosening the grip of Western academic requirements upon scholars and students. It means embracing cosmologies and ontologies of non-Western cultures in order to open new spaces for pedagogies and methodologies independent of Western notions of measurable academic achievement. In a word, it means embracing pluriversalism, an anti-concept that resounds throughout many decolonial methodologies and pedagogies. Yet despite its prominence in other fields, this notion has never been foregrounded in any full-length study of social work.

This co-edited volume does just that, and in so doing, it reveals a thriving subcurrent of othered ways of researching and teaching social work. This in turn opens new spaces for teaching and talking about social work in a manner that is more just, culturally sensitive, and attuned to structural power relations. Furthermore, it calls new attention to structural power relations still at play in many of the best-intentioned attempts to decolonize methodologies and pedagogies: while the chapters gathered here question the assumptions and current directions of empirical scientific research and academic education, they also engage critically with the risks of cultural appropriation endemic to pluriversal approaches, themselves, appropriations that would ultimately reproduce the exploitation mechanisms they aim to resist.

For its thought-provoking, highly original attention to important, even foundational, but badly neglected issues within the field, this book is a must-read for all scholars and students of social work, and particularly for those interested in issues related to diversity, pedagogy, or the history of the profession. It is also of keen interest for practitioners wishing to cast a critical eye on their own education and practice.

Robel Afeworki Abay is a PhD fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany.

Tanja Kleibl is Professor for Social Work, Migration and Diversity at University of Applied Sciences Wu]rzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany. She is also the author of Decolonizing Civil Society in Mozambique (Zed Books, 2021).

Anna-Lisa Klages is a research associate and PhD fellow at the BayWISS Academic Forum ＂Social Change＂ at the University of Applied Sciences Wurzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany, in affiliation with LMU Munich.

Sara Rodríguez Lugo is a student assistant at the University of Applied Sciences, Wurzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany.