chris.fike@deltapsych.com

Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes, and the Practice of Community Care (Part 3)

All Michigan social workers are invited to a virtual CE event on Wednesday, June 18 from 12-1:00pm.

FREE | 1 CE

Overview:

Join us as we discuss Kim, Rasmussen, & Washington’s Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes, and the Practice of Community Care. This discussion will focus on Section 3.

Within social work—a profession that has been intimately tied to and often complicit in the building and sustaining of the carceral state—abolitionist thinking, movement-building, and radical praxis are shifting the field. Critical scholarship and organizing have helped to name and examine the realities of carceral social work as a form of “soft policing.” For radical social work, abolition moves beyond critique to the politics of possibility. Abolition and Social Work offers an orientation to abolitionist theory for social workers and explores the tensions and paradoxes in realizing abolitionist practice in social work—a necessary intervention in contemporary discourse regarding carceral social work, and a compass for recentering this work through the lens of abolition, transformative justice, and collective care.

Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes, and the Practice of Community Care is available through your local library and favorite bookseller.

1 CE Credit is available for licensed attendees.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe impacts of white supremacy on social work education, practice, and scholarship
• Describe and contextualize decolonization within the context of the social work profession
• Identify strategies for disrupting white supremacist norms within social practice
  

Presented by Chris Fike, Region 5 Representative on the NASW-MI Board of Directors.

About the Authors --

Dr. Mimi Kim is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work California State University Long Beach. She earned her MSW at New York University and her PhD at the University of California Berkeley. Dr. Kim’s research focuses on social movements and community organizing with an emphasis on domestic violence and sexual assault in communities of color. She is a long-time anti-domestic violence advocate in Asian immigrant and refugee communities and other communities of color and remains active in the promotion of community organizing, community accountability, transformative justice, and restorative justice approaches to violence intervention and prevention. 

Cameron Rasmussen. Cameron Rasmussen is a social worker, educator and facilitator, and the Program Director at the Center for Justice at Columbia University. At the Center for Justice, his work is focused on ending the punishment paradigm and advancing approaches to justice rooted in prevention, healing, and accountability. Cameron is currently a PhD student in the Social Welfare program and a senior lecturer at Columbia School of Social Work. Cameron is also a Collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW), an organization that engages in political education, research and advocacy efforts to dismantle carceral social work while transforming our field to see abolition as a central framework for just social work practice.

More about the Decolonizing Social Work Book Club:

Decolonization in social work is the undoing of hegemony, the latter being the process whereby white supremacist values impregnated foundational social work theories, research, and practices. In recognizing that white supremacy is a mechanism of social control, that our current social structure is grounded in liberal-patriarchal capitalism, and that social work confirms to prevailing social norms, we, as social workers, must acknowledge our complicity in perpetuating a white supremacist ideology (Crudup, Fike, & McLoone, 2021; Pewewardy & Almeida, 2014). One strategy for disrupting white supremacy in social work is to develop a counter-narrative (Crudup, et al., 2021; Pewewardy & Almeida, 2014), a history that details the experiences of perspectives of those who have been oppressed, excluded, and silenced. The Decolonizing Social Work Book Club will meet on the 3rd Wednesday of each month starting in September 2024 and concluding in December 2025.

The voices highlighted in this book club offer counter-narrative perspectives across a range of issues and topics immediately relevant to social work.