A 40 year (contextualized) social work journey
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Issue Date
2022-03-01
Editor
Authors
Schmid, Jeanette
Subject
Abstract
Employing critical autoethnography, this article conveys how over my four decades of
social work, I have come to adopt a contextualized social work stance and identifies what
emerge as four key areas of contextualized social work. These include attention to race,
ethnicity and culture as experienced in the local environment, the local articulation of
social conditions and appropriate social work responses, the activation of local knowledge
generation and curation, and finally, addressing and resisting expert power. Such theorization
of contextualized social work augments previous work that positions contextualized
social work as countering dominant conceptualizations of social work and
instead centering on a critical interrogation of the local, foregrounding local understandings
of social conditions, and privileging local/(i)Indigenous knowledge production
and ways of doing and being. This critical understanding of context unsettles dominant
notions of context by focusing on power relationships. I hope that my story will add to the
growing discussion regarding alternative modes of practice and education that counter
dominant Westernized individualized social work perspectives and promote decolonized
approaches.
Description
This article was originally published as: Schmid, J. (2022). A 40 year (contextualized) social work journey. Qualitative Social Work, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/14733250221075757