•  
  •  
 

Abstract

In recent years, social work practitioners, educators, and scholars have increasingly wrestled with the harmful history of the profession, and sought ways to align the field with the anti-oppressive principles it has long espoused. One expression of this struggle is a growing interest in prison-industrial complex (PIC) abolition, primarily among social work students and early career scholars, who are eager to study this critical theory of change and apply it to the various domains of social work practice and research (e.g., schools, family policing, healthcare, the legal system, and beyond). As social work educators and scholars whose work is centered on reducing the size, scope, and power of the PIC, we regularly engage with doctoral students who wish to align their work with their deeply held values of justice, solidarity, and liberation. In response to these conversations, we designed a workshop for doctoral students in our program titled “Research for Structural Change.” This workshop provided students with a primer on PIC abolition and explored the framework of non-reformist reforms—a concept firmly rooted in abolitionist praxis—as a way to apply abolitionist thinking to their research inquiries. Non-reformist reforms, as opposed to reformist reforms, are changes that seek to alter the very foundation of a structure rather than leaving it intact and tinkering at the margins. This framework offers questions and heuristics which we employed to guide students working across substantive areas in developing research questions and designs that maximize the potential for structural transformation. During the workshop, we first modeled the exploration of examples from our own work, including projects that were uncompromising in their pursuit of abolitionist principles, as well as projects in which we negotiated the tensions of available opportunities, partnership constraints, and funding demands, or made deliberate decisions to engage in harm reduction within a systems context. We then provided students with prompts that helped them excavate and interrogate their specific areas of inquiry. For example, we asked them to identify the constructs and metrics traditionally centered in their area of research and to examine the underlying assumptions of those constructs and metrics. To help students engage with this exercise, we talked through “recidivism” and “criminogenic risk,” two commonly accepted measurements that are ubiquitous within our realm of criminal punishment work and uphold harmful constructions of safety. Our facilitation approach created an intentional space for students to be vulnerable about their difficulties. We found that students openly shared examples, questions, and conundrums, and were able to generatively challenge themselves and others. Afterward, we received affirmation and appreciation from students about how the workshop shifted their thinking. This manuscript will provide an in-depth description of this original teaching activity, and offer our reflexive experience as educators and facilitators. It will show how this teaching activity expanded our students’ capacity for recognizing how research can uphold systems of oppression, and strengthened their skills in designing research for structural change.

Download

Share

COinS