Coloniality of Power and International Students Experience: What are the Ethical Responsibilities of Social Work and Human Service Educators?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores theoretical responses to the living structures of dominance and subordination within modern postcolonial societies, highlighting racialised international students’ experiences within Australian universities. Drawing on coloniality of power and border thinking, it seeks to address ethical responsibilities for social work and human service educators from the author’s positioning as a non-Western immigrant ‘Other’, and experience of belonging as an educator of future social work and human service practitioners in Australia. Utilising autoethnographic and qualitative study, the article offers great insight into the systemic nature of discrimination in Australian tertiary education institutions. It suggests a need for critical, self-reflexive awareness about the legacies of colonialism and hegemonic whiteness to permeate social work and human service profession and education. This article, thus, enables decolonising minds, securing informed understanding, and initiating a shift in the way non-white (and non-Western) racialised international social work students are seen, constructed, and understood in contemporary Australian (Western) societies.