Decolonial Methodologies in Social Work : Foregrounding Pluriversalism in Teaching and Research

This open access book offers an original exploration of how the notion of pluriversalism, an anti-colonial concept that resounds throughout many decolonial methodologies and pedagogies, underlies many current attempts to develop more just and equitable approaches to social work teaching and research. Despite its prominence in other fields, pluriversalism has never been foregrounded in any full-length study of social work. This co-edited volume does just that, and in so doing, it codifies a thriving, but otherwise diffuse, subcurrent of alternative, othered ways of researching and teaching social work. It foregrounds local knowledges while maintaining a global scope and empirically grounded perspective, and in so doing it shows how pluriversal approaches open new spaces around the world for teaching and talking about social work in a manner that is more just, culturally sensitive, and attuned to structural power relations. In that same self-critical spirit, the chapters gathered here also engage critically with the risks of cultural appropriation endemic to pluriversal approaches, themselves, appropriations that would ultimately reproduce the exploitation mechanisms they aim to resist. This is a must-read for social work students, researchers, and practitioners interested in development studies, decolonial studies, and Indigenous studies. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Robel Abay is guest professor of participatory approaches in social and health sciences at Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin.

Anna-Lisa Klages is a research associate and PhD fellow at the BayWISS Academic Forum “Social Change” at the University of Applied Sciences Wurzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany, in affiliation with LMU Munich.

Sara Rodríguez Lugo is a student assistant at the University of Applied Sciences, Wurzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany.

Tanja Kleibl is Professor for Social Work, Migration and Diversity at University of Applied Sciences Wurzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany. She is also the author of Decolonizing Civil Society in Mozambique (Zed Books, 2021).