Search

Despite efforts by scholars to visibilize Black women's community work, we still lack a framework that captures the nuances in the work arrangements of Black women serving and advocating for their communities. Our paper introduces a new conceptual framework, the Continuum of Transformative and Reproductive Labor (CTRL), to recognize this hidden multiform labor of racialized women. The CTRL places community work that reproduces oppressive social structures on a spectrum opposite what we call transformative labor—labor that disrupts systems of oppression. The CTRL framework distinguishes social reproductive and transformative community work along four dimensions, (1) the type of power each produces, (2) workers' autonomy and leadership, (3) workers' motivation, and (4) how the work is valued. We explore the utility of the CTRL framework for analyzing multiple types of community work Black women perform by highlighting historical and contemporary cases in two different labor contexts. Ultimately, we make a key contribution to feminist social work; Recognizing the community as a site of social reproductive labor, we create a new framework to acknowledge Black women's labor in the community as distinct in its capacity to transform social systems by resisting the reproduction of racial and gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this conceptual piece, I use a framework of embodiment to argue for approaches to inquiry that are better suited to engage and amplify Black womxn's knowledges in social work than are more popular social sciences methods. I also relate embodiment to several epistemic frames, and warn against disembodiment through more popular methods. Finally, I present three embodied research approaches that align with feminist social work principles. Throughout the piece, I reference works that explore feminist and embodied practices while centering Black womxn. I also frame discussion through my own embodiment as a Black femme scholar and practitioner, and embodiment and its potential in inquiries through a Black feminist tradition. Embodiment has been a framework of feminist scholarship for decades, broadly defined as living out knowledge through the body and/or in its environments through a process of becoming. Scholars in this school of thought account for their and participants' emotions and dispositions as part of how knowledge is lived, while treating the body as a text to be read. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work praxis has long been in conversation with feminist praxis and has more recently been informed by an anticolonial feminist praxis that aims to center theorizing, activism, and service delivery around individuals and communities considered "most marginalized." While this "most marginalized" class may be deemed newly worthy social service consumers this framing reinforces extant settler colonial hierarchies of power and oppression by constituting new classes of "deserving" and "undeserving" social service recipients. This article explores how the feminist organizing, scholarship, and activism of the past decade—specifically around the #MeToo movement and trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) wars—have impacted social work praxis and laid bare the dualistic binds of a post-structuralism that has been consumed and recast within neoliberalism as demobilized identity politics. By examining these limitations, questions are raised regarding next steps for a social work praxis concerned with justice, transformation, and liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic research hinges on the role of epistemic peers in order to evaluate newly presented claims and evidence. As social work research is often focused on social problems and systems of oppressions, scholars from the margins most impacted are even better poised to conduct and evaluate said research. Throughout the past few decades, social work scholars have adjusted the ways we teach about and conduct research in order to be increasingly critical of the status quo and more culturally attuned. However, many of the adjustments that are recommended (e.g., community advisory boards) assume that the researcher is an outsider to the community being researched. Trans-focused research is an area where this impact is especially glaring, as an influx of out-trans researchers are able to join the field. This article provides an overview of the concepts of epistemic peers and standpoint theory before describing community-engaged research processes in order to illuminate how these practices (re)produce harm and/or are built on assumptions that the researchers themselves are not trans/nonbinary. In order for trans scholarship to continue to grow and produce the most culturally attuned results, social work academia must foster and prioritize trans epistemic peerhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]