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Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and liberation scholars from Latin America, this article examines the role of social work, as both an academic discipline and a practice, in the context of the recent refugee crisis. This role mirrors the historical development of social work and is further highlighted by recent empirical studies of refugee experiences on Greek islands. The authors call for an active political coalition between social work practitioners and refugees, with the aim of empowering the latter in their quest for liberation from the regime of European refugee management.
The dramatic pictures of violence on the Polish - Belorussian border, preventable shipwrecks off the coast of Italy and Greece or the killing of people attempting to cross the border into the Spanish exclave of Melilla are just the latest manifestation of the dehumanization, securitization and externalization of the EU migration management policies. A trend that can be traced to early 2000s has achieved a new level in recent years after a brief opening of EU borders around 2015. The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified these dynamics in important ways and deepened inequalities of transnational mobility (Lee 2020; Sumba 2021; Afeworki Abay, Kassaye and Kleibl 2022; Matela and Maaza 2022). The flight of people from Ukraine into the EU after the Russian invasion has highlighted the differential treatment of refugees based on intersecting hierarchies of racialization, gender and citizenship.
Este volumen cuestiona las formas tradicionales de crear conocimiento en la investigación sobre migración y se propone a descentralizar el sesgo eurocéntrico del país receptor y explorar los procesos de migración Sur-Sur proporcionando perspectivas del país de origen sobre la migración. El libro está dividido en secciones sobre Perspectivas, Experiencias e Intervenciones para buscar activamente posibilidades para como moldear procesos sociales vitales conectados con la migración. Con este fin, en la sección final hay la tradición del trabajo social como disciplina académica y práctica profesional enfocada en la transformación social, más que como una práctica a nivel micro de “control” o “educación” de personas y familias que se consideran fuera de la sociedad “normal”. Este volumen persigue el objetivo de reivindicar la misión política del trabajo social como fuerza activa de transformación social y mostrar cómo el trabajo social puede ser una fuerza para diseñar políticas activamente, en lugar de ser solo una herramienta de control de la migración.
The history of social work and the modern Western university paradoxically represents both the high point and low point of human progress. Conceived in an epoch of immense human discovery, it is important to understand this period as characterised by white Western Imperialist and Colonial projects and the rise of capitalist accumulation. In combination, these processes, not confined to the geo-political points of origin, continue to have devastating impacts across the world, characterised by the exploitation, displacement, and destruction of human beings as well as natural ecosystems. Hegemonic colonial structures and practices created and reproduced global racialised hierarchies with the dominance of the Global North and the 'Othering' of knowledge forms and ways of life emerging from the Global South. Struggles for decolonisation and anti-racism come from an ongoing refusal by the victims of capitalism and imperialism to accept defeat and to continue to struggle for life, liberty and dignity. In the current moment, especially following the brutal public execution of George Floyd in the US and the Black Lives Matter movement, especially amongst youth, we have witnessed a global response, incorporating gestures of solidarity, through the ‘taking of the knee’ through to direct action to remove statues and monuments celebrating various characters associated with Empire, slavery and colonial exploitation. Decolonial perspectives are often neglected in the Global North. At the same time, activist intellectuals such as Freire, Fanon, and also Gandhi remain important sources for social work practice otherwise. Decolnialism refers both to a specific global conjuncture and to a broad range of theoretical analyses and political dispositions, borne out of the struggle of countries in the Global South to escape from colonial rule and from neo-colonial global power relations. In parallel, post-colonial thought critiques the Northern and Western-centrism of what passes for global knowledge, distrusting particularistic knowledge forms that pretend to a universal understanding and reach and, instead, seek to bring back pluriversal thinking. Crucially, an anti-colonialist paradigm focuses on dismantling global structures of domination – in thought, language, action, suggesting that political and conceptual work is needed, constantly, to challenge the powerful legacies of the colonial past. This bias is as present in social work as it is in other disciplines and practices, eroding the memory and relevance of alternative traditions and practices. Alongside geo-political colonisation there were parallel processes of the colonisation of madness, childhood, sexuality, poverty, gender, disability and old age. In all of these examples, the dominant powers use the same, or similar, patterns of subordinating, even erasing, ‘The Other’, through disciplines of care and control that involve oppression and exploitation. Crucially, the planet, and its finite resources, are being colonised for profit through unfettered extractivist productivism. Social work's emergence as a profession was deeply implicated in social Darwinism and eugenics, trends that have re-emerged in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding global inequality as a phenomenon deriving from colonialism, imperialism and capitalism, this course seeks to address the prosepcts for a decolnial social work, a social work otherise, a social work of the South and the ways these can and should be reflected in social work education, training and rpactice. How can international documents (conventions, treaties etc.) be used to combat the colonialist paradigm? What kinds of alternative understandings of the relationship between people and nature exist and how can these be used as part of the anti-colonial struggle? What are some of the colonising and de-colonising effects of international efforts in social work? How can indigenous wisdom, local and hidden intelligence and skills, be preserved and built upon? How can patriarchal values be turned off and around, providing the openings for values of care, solidarity and kindness? Can minor subversions of social work contribute to major changes?
The dramatic pictures of violence on the Polish - Belorussian border are just the latest manifestation of the dehumanization, securitization and externalization of the EU migration management policies. A trend that can be traced to early 2000s has achieved a new level in recent years after a brief opening of EU borders in 2015. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified these dynamics in different ways and deepened inequalities of the transnational mobility (Lee 2020; Sumba 2021; Afeworki Abay, Kassaye & Kleibl 2022; Matela & Maaza 2022). In addition to physical violence by state and non-state actors along the EU external border, EU migration management employs strategies that condone prolonged exposure of mobile people to death and to a host of human rights violations (Mbembe 2003, 2019; Mayblin & Turner 2020; Mayblin 2016, 2019; Abuya, Krause & Mayblin 2021; Sadeghi 2019). At the same time, civil society members, media representatives and those who attempt to assist mobile people are also increasingly criminalized, exposed to right-extremist violence and targeted by excessive legal, financial and bureaucratic burdens that make their work difficult, if not impossible. Externalization as a central characteristic of EU border management refers to the propounding mechanisms of moving the border forward (Andrews 2021; Getachew 2019; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018a, 2018b; Mayblin, 2017; Mayblin, Wake & Kazemi 2019). Outside of the EU, externalization policies construct EU border controls in so-called countries of origin and transit. In this process, EU migration management is fused with foreign policy, international development and international trade mechanisms. These incursions disrupt socioeconomic dynamics and local mobility patterns as far as Iran-Turkey borderlands, West African ECOWAS region or the border between Ethiopia and the Sudan. The internal and external EU migration management developments are inseparable and materialized legacies of colonialism, enduring gender inequalities, politics of citizenship and racialized economies (Andrews 2021; Getachew 2019). This book therefore aims to critically analyze how Social Work and EU migration management regimes co-constitute each other. The here presented book will offer theoretical discussions and practical experiences around the following questions: In which way is Social Work complicit in the EU migration management regime? Where do Social Workers find opportunities to build solidarities, become subversive of the hegemonic structures and work for empowerment? How do Social Workers deal with the increasingly restrictive political, legal and economic environment, in which they engage with mobile people? How can Social Work become more apt to working with people who are at times highly mobile and at times immobilized in remote camps, forests or desert outposts? Moreover, this book espouses the broadest definition of Social Work as a human rights profession and an academic discipline but also as an indigenous way of social assistance and social change (Staub-Bernasconi 2012, 2016; Healy & Link 2011; Kleibl, Lutz & Noyoo 2020). By paying attention to the temporal and spatial aspects of Social Work with mobile people, we explicitly refuse the apolitical, decontextualized view of Social Work as neutral „helping“, instead we plea for critical reflection on the entanglements of Social Work in complex, intersecting power dynamics. Hence, this book seeks to critically analyze how Social Work becomes entangled in categorization of people to make them „legible“ and „visible“ to EU migration management and how Social Work itself is categorized in order to be disciplined as a „helping“ profession and an instrument of the state/EU migration management. We ask how Social Work could be transformed to work in a multiscalar, transnational scale, truly living up to the ambition to employ „glocal“ approach.