Imperial entanglements of modern social work education in India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article concerns itself with the events surrounding the ‘Americanisation’ of social work education in India and aims to evaluate if this was an outcome of entanglements with imperialism—cultural, professional or moral. It looks at actors, within and beyond academic spaces, including missionaries and cold war politics as key contours in organizing the ‘American’ turn in social work education in India. Subsequent to the import of the ‘modern social work’ discipline to India, the episteme of social work was inferred to be more clinicalized and neo-liberal in its approach to social development. The article is a humble effort to understand if this ‘technology transfer’ of social work education, its models and methods, was a plain and simple emancipatory event or was also organized by the imperial interests?