Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminism, particularly situated freedom, ambiguity and refusal of othering, this manuscript critiques contemporary social work. From a feminist social work standpoint, it situates sex work within intersecting regimes of gender, migration, criminalisation and moral regulation, arguing neo-abolitionist approaches reproduce paternalism alone. Sex work is a deeply contested site in feminist social work, where commitments to gender justice, protection and autonomy collide. In Ireland, these tensions intensified following adoption of the Nordic model under the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017, framed as feminist yet increasingly shown to harm sex workers’ safety and autonomy.
Feminist social work has long engaged sex work and its related issues and concerns, largely through discursive and practice arenas. Less present in social work specific scholarship is a focus on policy frameworks in the United States for managing and regulating sex work. This pilot study employed an exploratory qualitative design to examine sex work policy, specifically the impacts of the criminalization of sex work on people in the sex trades in Oregon. The findings engage two interrelated and mutually constitutive domains of harm produced by criminalization, namely the manufacturing of stigma and cascading harms. Criminalization operates as a mechanism of social regulation that legislates sex workers as “others,” restricting access to full social and economic participation. Legal stigma and punitive sanctions generate material and symbolic forms of exclusion, producing isolation, economic precarity, and heightened vulnerability to harm. By centering the voices and experiences of sex workers impacted by policy, this study contributes to critical feminist social work scholarship and policy debates. The findings challenge dominant regulatory frameworks by demonstrating how criminalization functions as a structural determinant of harm, underscoring the urgent need for social work engagement with decriminalization and rights-based approaches to sex work policy.
Palestinian feminist scholars have long described Palestine as a feminist issue, foregrounding the intersections between critical feminist commitments and the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people—my people. Creating, experiencing, and sharing poetry amid genocide can function as a mode of collective resistance, countering the isolation and division imposed by settler colonial systems. Creativity and imagination are likewise central to feminist relationalities and praxes. As a parent and queer/trans muslim Palestinian scholar-artist, the processes of writing and sharing poetry have been sustaining as I witness atrocities live-streamed. Observing how children are treated within these conditions surfaces the profound sorrow we are forced to carry; this collection speaks directly to that grief. Each poem centers children as both subjects and witnesses. In “Redacted,” I speculate on my father's affective experience as he endured the Nakba at five years old. “Yalla, Yamshi,” a visual poem, traces the journey that led my family to settle on Turtle Island (the United States) in pursuit of “a better life” for their children. “A Palestinian Mother” is visceral and immediate, imagining the desperation surrounding a mother's devastating words. In the final poem, “Ever, Again,” I turn to my own children, confronting the impossibility of taking their lives for granted. A truly feminist world would ensure that no child is subjected to violence; that such suffering persists remains an indictment of us all. Creative expression through critical feminisms offers the possibility of truth-telling as balm for these open wounds.
A challenging aspect of practice for social work students is the client's expression of sexual feelings for them. From a feminist perspective, sexualization by clients may be seen as an expression of gendered power dynamics. Historically, the emergence of sexual feelings on the part of the client has been conceptualized as erotic transference. This article presents a conceptual framework to help students explore the range of potential meanings of sexualization by clients. It highlights the power dynamics that can play out between clients and social workers, including those related to intersectional social identities, trauma history, and role in the relationship.
Black mothers in South Carolina face significant challenges navigating maternal health care systems shaped by structural racism, gendered power, and historical inequities. Despite these conditions, they demonstrate resilience through advocacy, relational care, and culturally grounded coping strategies. Guided by critical race theory, Black feminist thought, resilience theory, and feminist ethics of care, this qualitative study explored the resilience and coping strategies of 20 Black mothers in South Carolina using semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. The analysis identified six themes: (1) resilience through advocacy and agency, (2) empowerment through knowledge and education, (3) social support as a coping mechanism, (4) navigating and coping with structural racism, (5) seeking alternative and holistic care approaches, and (6) resilience in emotional and mental health. By centering Black women's lived experiences and relational care practices, this study advances feminist social work scholarship and highlights how Black mothers enact agency, resistance, and care within maternal health systems. Findings underscore the need for culturally responsive maternal health care, anti-racist provider practices, and integrated mental health supports to promote equity in maternal care.
This conceptual paper examines how feminist social work pedagogy, integrated with Critical Feminist Narrative Analysis (CFNA) and Situation Analysis (SA), supports the development of structural analytic capacity in social work education. Through a comparative narrative analysis of two women-centered texts, The Help (Jim Crow Mississippi) and Pachinko (Japanese colonialism and Korean diaspora), the paper examines how intersecting forms of oppression are structured and experienced across distinct historical, cultural, and geopolitical contexts. CFNA interprets how women's experiences are narrated through dynamics of voice, representation, and positionality, while SA, informed by Fullilove's (2004) concept of root shock, examines oppression as a lived environment shaped by relational, spatial, and structural conditions. Across both narratives, recurring patterns emerge, including relational disruption, environmental instability, and conditional belonging, alongside everyday forms of resistance. Building on these insights, the paper proposes a scaffolded pedagogical framework that guides learners from narrative engagement toward structural diagnosis, bridging micro-level experiences with macro-level systems of power and reframing cultural responsiveness as an outcome of structural analytic capacity rather than a discrete competency. This approach supports more nuanced, contextually grounded, and socially just practice in increasingly transnational settings.
Mental health crises are predominantly conceptualized as individualized events defined by biomedical symptoms and risk thresholds, a framing that systematically marginalizes family caregivers’ experiences. Drawing on feminist ethics of care, this qualitative study reframes mental health crisis as a relational phenomenon constituted within caregiving relationships. Based on in-depth interviews with 19 family caregivers in Taiwan, this study explores how caregivers understand, experience, and navigate mental health crises that are often not recognized as legitimate targets of intervention. Thematic analysis identifies four interrelated relational dimensions of crisis: protective vigilance, affective conflict, loss of connection, and destabilized relational system. These dimensions reveal how crises unfold not only within individuals but across relational and emotional contexts, producing ethical distress and invisible labor for caregivers. By centering caregivers’ lived experiences, this study challenges dominant, individualized crisis paradigms and contributes a care-ethical framework for understanding mental health crises as relational ruptures rather than isolated individual mental breakdowns. The study contributes to feminist and mental health social work by adopting a relational lens of mental health crisis. Social work can more effectively respond to mental health crisis in ways that honor both autonomy and care, not as opposing values, but as mutually constituted within relationships.
