A 40 year (contextualized) social work journey

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.