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This book presents current scholarship designed to decolonize, reform and confront the Euro-centric dominance in social work education and practice. This compact volume strings together new content from internationally recognised authors in the field of social work to address this need. Decolonising social work seeks to weaken the effect of colonialism and create opportunities to promote traditional practices in contemporary settings. Its focus is to draw attention to the effects of globalisation and the universalization of social work education, methods of practice and international development that fail to embrace and recognise local knowledges and methods by bringing new and fresh perspectives to social work. It can also be seen as a significant contribution to social work's more critical stance and long-standing struggle to challenge the hegemonic Euro-centric epistemology. With decoloniality becoming a global imperative, this collection brings together case studies from world scholars and decolonial voices in order to explore opportunities, challenges and trends to decolonize through culturally relevant curricula, including: Social Work and Decolonisation: Student Social Workers'Understanding of the Concepts of ‘Culture', ‘Cultural Identity'and ‘Decolonisation'Developing Curriculum for Criminal Justice Social Work from the Field New Directions in Trauma Work? Cultural Trauma Theory as an Instrument to Contextualise and Address Histories of Pain in Global Communities Analysing and Understanding Intersections: Using Nayak's ‘Intersectional Model of Reflection'in Social Work Teaching Decolonizing Social Work Education and Curriculum Utilizing Cultural Competemility and Professionalism Approach Exploring New Horizons for Decolonial Social Work Education is essential reading for practitioners, policy makers, instructors, researchers, and other social work professionals. The book may be used as a supplemental text for social work courses. The national and international focus of the volume will be highly relevant to all social work programmes across the globe.

This volume argues that refusal is a viable political ethics in education. It is an ethics that allows space for new possibilities to emerge, with the potential to enrich higher education study and pedagogies in the future. Chapters examine the ethical, epistemological, political and affective premises of refusing the colonial university, and reflect upon what refusal means for higher education decolonization across international settings. Refusal marks a political ethos and praxis that denies, resists, reframes and redirects colonial and neoliberal logics, while asserting diverse sovereignties and lifeworlds. Whereas resistance may reinscribe the weakness of the colonized in the power relations with the colonizer, refusal interrupts the smooth operation of power relations, denying the authority of the settler state and remaking the rules of engagement. It is a political stance and action that denies the very legitimacy of power over the subjugated. This collection views refusal not as an end in itself, nor as a mode of critique, but as a necessary first step for educators and students in higher education to invest in the idea of radically different modes of futurity. It explores how educators and students in higher education can invent pedagogies of refusal that function ethically, affectively and politically, and asks: What do pedagogies of refusal look like? How might western universities sustain and support refusal, rather than discipline it? What assumptions are sustained by ruling out certain educational futures as out of bounds, or impossible? This book will be important reading for researchers, scholars and educators in Decolonizing Education, Higher Education Transformation, and Philosophy of Education. It will also be valuable to policymakers and activists who are considering how refusal might be carried out within and outside institutions.

Despite committed effort to integrate postcolonial theory and decolonizing practices in human rights education in social work, there is scant literature offering a more balanced global perspective. This book addresses that need. Included here are discursive voices contributed by social work colleagues whose work is impacted by postcolonial realities. The task of decolonizing social work as a human rights profession calls for the inclusion of contesting perspectives from social work activists, human rights advocates and educators whose critical standpoints are drawn from the historical context of Global North-South relations. This book is essential given the many manifestations of global injustice, wars and climate catastrophes. The critical involvement of social workers in decolonized human rights advocacy is at no period in history, more urgent than now. The book: Engages readers in reflective discourse over the contentious manner human rights principles are referenced by social work practitioners within the context of contemporary North-South geopolitics Explores dilemmas, conflicts, challenges and limitations experienced by social workers worldwide while upholding human rights principles Uses critical case studies that expose how the vestiges of colonialism continue to impact communities Identifies areas of human rights advocacy where social work succeeds, and where it is confronted by limiting challenges Emphasizes the importance of human rights education and practice in the context of global inequalities Decolonized Approaches to Human Rights and Social Work provides models of good practice the world over in human rights advocacy. It is timely and essential reading for faculty who teach courses in social work, social development, community organization, human rights and social justice, as well as for students in social work, law, sociology, global studies and human rights. The book should draw readers who work in non-governmental organizations, international development agencies, advocacy groups, and community-based and grassroots organizations. International research centers, law clinics and organizations serving migrants and refugees would find it a useful resource.

Decolonial Arts Praxis: Transnational Pedagogies and Activism illustrates the productive potential of critical arts pedagogies in the ongoing work of decolonization by engaging art, activism, and transnational feminisms.Offering contributions from scholars, educators, artists, and activists from varied disciplines, the volume highlights how arts can reveal intersectional forms of oppression, inform critical understandings, and rebuild transnational solidarities across geopolitical borders. The contributors present forms of inquiry, creative writing, art, and reflection that grapple with issues of colonialism, racism, and epistemological violence to illustrate the power of decolonial arts pedagogies in formal and informal education.Using a range of multiple and intersectional critical lenses through which readers can examine ways in which transnational feminist theorizing and art pedagogy inform, shape, and help strategize activism in various spaces, it will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students, and practitioners with interests in arts education, the sociology of education, postcolonialism, and multicultural education.

This book explores pedagogical approaches to decolonising the literature curriculum through a range of practical and theoretically-informed case studies. Although decolonising the curriculum has been widely discussed in the academe and the media, sustained examinations of pedagogies involved in decolonising the literature at university level are still lacking in English and related subjects. This book makes a crucial contribution to these evolving discussions, presenting current and critically engaged pedagogical scholarship on decolonising the literature curriculum. Offering a broad spectrum of accessible chapters authored by experienced national and international academics, the book is structured into two parts, Texts and Contexts, presenting case studies on decolonising the literature curriculum which range from the undergraduate classroom, university writing centres, through to the literary doctorate.

This book offers new ways of engagement for leaders seeking to connect theory to practice in decolonizing education. In the current climate where xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiments, and other forms of exclusion make up much of the discourse, educational leaders need to seek ways to foreground other forms of knowledge and transfer them into their daily leadership practices. Lopez contributes to other critical leadership approaches while foregrounding a decolonizing approach that unsettles the coloniality manifested in education and school practices. Chapters provide school leaders with examples of ways they can challenge coloniality, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression in schooling that negatively impact some students and their educational outcomes.

This timely volume uniquely illustrates how currere can be applied to the process of decolonizing subjectivity. Centered around the experiences of one black woman from the third world, the text details the theoretical underpinnings of Currere towards Decolonizing (CTD), and walks the reader through the autobiographical analysis involved in dismantling cognitive colonization.Conceived as a four-part autobiographical process of remembering, identifying, imagining, and decolonizing, the method of CTD is demonstrated as a means of recognizing and reflecting on how the colonial project has been internalized, and of gradually dismantling the psychological, affective, and material impact of colonization. Using both theoretical and experiential standpoints, and intersecting with notions of anti-blackness, linguicide, and Africana womanhood, the volume moves curriculum theory urgently towards anti-colonial mechanisms that disrupt the colonizing process.This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators in higher education with an interest in curriculum studies, post-colonialism, and Black studies more broadly. Those specifically interested in interpersonal psychoanalysis, as well as gender and third world studies, will also benefit from this book.

To expand the possibilities of “doing arts thinking” from a non-Eurocentric view, Artistic Mentoring as a Decolonizing Methodology: An Evolving Collaborative Painting Ethnography with Maya Artists Pedro Rafael González Chavajay and Paula Nicho Cúmez is grounded in Indigenous perspectives on arts practice, arts research, and art education. Mentored in painting for eighteen years by two Guatemalan Maya artists, Kryssi Staikidis, a North American painter and art education professor, uses both Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies, which involve respectful collaboration, and continuously reexamines her positions as student, artist, and ethnographer searching to redefine and transform the roles of the artist as mentor, historian/activist, ethnographer, and teacher. The primary purpose of the book is to illuminate the Maya artists as mentors, the collaborative and holistic processes underlying their painting, and the teaching and insights from their studios. These include Imagined Realism, a process excluding rendering from observation, and the fusion of pedagogy and curriculum into a holistic paradigm of decentralized teaching, negotiated curriculum, personal and cultural narrative as thematic content, and the surrounding visual culture and community as text. The Maya artist as cultural historian creates paintings as platforms of protest and vehicles of cultural transmission, for example, genocide witnessed in paintings as historical evidence. The mentored artist as ethnographer cedes the traditional ethnographic authority of the colonizing stance to the Indigenous expert as partner and mentor, and under this mentorship analyzes its possibilities as decolonizing arts-based qualitative inquiry. For the teacher, Maya world views broaden and integrate arts practice and arts research, inaugurating possibilities to transform arts education.

Raza Struggle and the Movement for Ethnic Studies: Decolonial Pedagogies, Literacies, and Methodologies presents an investigation of decolonization in the context of education and what this means for ethnic studies projects. It accomplishes this exploration by looking at the history of Raza communities, defined broadly as the Indigenous and mestizo working class peoples from Latin America, with a focus on the complex yet unifying Chicanx-Mexican experience in the Southwest United States. This book bridges the fields of history, pedagogy, and decolonization through a creative and interweaving methodology that includes critical historiography, dialogue, autoethnography, and qualitative inquiry. Collectively, this work opens new ground, challenging scholars and educators to rethink critical education rooted in traditional and Western frameworks. Arguing for decolonial and Indigenous approaches, the author invites educators and cultural workers to reflect on learning and community in their praxis. Raza Struggle and the Movement for Ethnic Studies will be of interest to students of ethnic studies and Latin American and Mexican history. It is also relevant to teachers, teacher educators, and scholars who are intent on creating spaces of hope and possibility rooted in Freirean, decolonial, and Indigenous frameworks.

Knowledge and Decolonial Politics: A Critical Reader offers the perspectives of educators and learners within current developmental settings, highlighting the systemic barriers faced whilst trying to implement decolonial pedagogies and practices. In the hope to challenge the dominance of Western Eurocentric thought in education and international development, the authors of this book offer counter narratives to promote the use of embodied cultural knowledges and histories, along with Indigenous perspectives, in order to subvert Western knowledge systems which are inherently colonial in nature. Changing education as we know it today requires creating spaces in which multiple knowledges can co-exist and benefit from one another. These spaces will ensure the continuity of decolonial practices and shape the intellectual politics of future generations. Contributors are: Olivia Aiello, Nana Bediako-Amoah, Shirleen Datt, George J. Sefa Dei, Chisani Doyle-Wood, Candice Griffith, Mandeep Jajj, Wambui Karanja and Lwanga G. Musisi.

Through innovative and critical research, this anthology inquires and challenges issues of race and positionality, empirical sciences, colonial education models, and indigenous knowledges. Chapter authors from diverse backgrounds present empirical explorations that examine how decolonial work and Indigenous knowledges disrupt, problematize, challenge, and transform ongoing colonial oppression and colonial paradigm. This book utilizes provocative and critical research that takes up issues of race, the shortfalls of empirical sciences, colonial education models, and the need for a resurgence in Indigenous knowledges to usher in a new public sphere. This book is a testament of hope that places decolonization at the heart of our human community.