Newly resettled indigenous communities often remain invisible to social work practice until a crisis demands intervention. This Voices from Practice section draws on engagement with the Gond tribe, India’s largest Indigenous community, particularly a displaced Gond settlement in Gondi Nagar, Coimbatore, uprooted from Nagpur, Maharashtra, over 60 years ago and now comprising nearly 1000 households. Fieldwork pointed out the depth of these vulnerabilities and the ethical and practice complexities of evaluating a historically displaced community without repeating extractive patterns, shaping an adapted application of Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC’s) Graduation Approach. Assessment itself, done sensitively, is already an intervention.
Drawing on practice experience as a social worker on the Syria–Türkiye border, this reflection argues that effective social work with displaced families begins where families choose to begin. Rather than starting from professional assumptions, families consistently prioritized housing, education, caregiving, income, and safety as the foundations of rebuilding everyday life. These experiences reshaped my understanding of assessment and intervention, highlighting the value of shared understanding, collaborative decision-making, and family-centered practice. A reflective practice framework is proposed to support more responsive and meaningful social work with displaced families in the future.
The century-long quest for global social work identity is challenged by dominant Western standards. This article proposes polycentric indigenisation, treating diverse traditions as mutual, legitimate knowledge centres to achieve epistemic justice. Using content analysis of the China Association of Social Work Education conference handbook, this study examines research in the Chinese Mainland. Chinese social work aligns deeply with national strategies, such as rural revitalisation, pursuing an autonomous knowledge system. This state-centric focus, however, risks limiting critical autonomy and global engagement. The findings illuminate how polycentric indigenisation offers a pathway towards a pluralistic, reciprocal and highly inclusive global community of social work.
