Anti-oppressive Community Work Practice and the Decolonization Debate

Abstract

This chapter serves to contribute to an enlargement of contemporary, anti-oppressive social work theories and notions of community work practice. It is motivated by apparent gaps in existing discourses concerning the experiences, perspectives, knowledges, and practices of colonized peoples. The central concept by which the chapter seeks to meet its objective is that of (de)coloniality. This concept denotes forms of oppression that are particular to the regions of the Global South and, it is suggested, require to be recognized as such. The chapter’s arguments are constructed around a case study, which narrates a community work intervention, conducted over a number of years by social work students at a selected South African university. To contextualize this, the chapter takes a historical perspective and provides a situated account. Following an opening discussion of anti-oppressive theories and how these might benefit from decolonial scholarship, the contextual challenges for South African social work are examined with particular consideration of how these have arisen from the country’s history of colonialism and current reality of coloniality. The case study is presented thereafter using the anti-oppressive language favored by the students involved. Further reflections are presented using a decolonial frame. The chapter concludes that anti-oppressive theorizing and community work practices have an important role to play in locations of the Global South, such as South Africa. However, for social workers to respond meaningfully to the continued workings of coloniality in such contexts, a central professional binary – that of social worker/service user – may need to be unsettled.