Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color (BIWOC) educators working in predominantly White institutions (PWIs) disproportionately experience violence rooted in historical, structural, and interpersonal oppressions that negatively impact mental and physical health which necessitates multi-level healing. In response, a BIWOC educators' healing circle incorporated Critical Transformative Potential Development (CTPD) to create a collective and collaborative healing process from the harm of institutional gendered racism. The BIWOC circle integrated decolonial strategies, including storytelling and healing spaces, to encourage the cultivation of sustainable health and wellness practices. Through the reflective narratives of four BIWOC healing circle participants, we consider the ways CTPD can be a decolonizing force. Participant narratives support the introduction of Soulcial Work Praxis (SWP), and its evolution from CTPD, as a decolonizing theoretical framework for soul care, transformation, and healing, proclaiming that rebellion is our salvation, community is our protection, and healing is our liberation. The SWP dimensions within participants' reflections highlight our pillars of humanity: space, grace, time, and opportunity. Considerations for broader application in social work education, research, and practice are also presented.
decolonization and indigenization of higher education and professional training of mental health. King and colleagues, a racially diverse group of educators from Western Canada, share the development of an anti-racial and anti-colonial praxis course. What is particularly unique about this course is the educators’ continuous engagement with local Indigenous and other racialized communities in the development of the teaching materials and assignments, including the students’ collaboration with Indigenous and other racialized youths to develop action plans. Both articles provide theoretically
Social work is in a crucial position to reshape its current teachings centering dominant culture’s practices focused on white supremacist theoretical frameworks. Rethinking the social work curriculum requires decolonizing the way we teach and practice, not as a metaphor, but as a concerted effort to incorporate anti-racist and liberation-based ideologies with an emphasis on centering the voices of Black people, folks Indigenous to the Americas, and non-Black People of Color. Through the narratives of students, faculty, and alumni, we highlight our stories in creating, evaluating, and maintaining a course on decolonizing social work education at a predominantly white institution (PWI). We provide an overview of a collaborative effort to create and develop the power, race, oppression, and privilege (PROP) framework. Through the eyes of the PROP Collective, included here are: the history and content of the Foundations of Social Work/Decolonizing Social Work (DSW) course or the “PROP class,” student activism, course suffusion, teaching and learning methodologies, and yearly reflections toward improvement, facilitator support, and ongoing multidisciplinary collaborative effort to improve the course.
One reason why patients may seek therapy is to address constricting beliefs about themselves, others and the world that diminish the quality of their lives. These pathogenic beliefs interfere with the pursuit of personal goals and are often the source of considerable distress. In this paper, we discuss the perspective from Control-Mastery Theory that such beliefs were once adaptive in the context of earlier traumatic relational experience, and are often held in place by loyalties and attachment ties to important figures. Therapists can facilitate patients' efforts to disconfirm these beliefs by empathically understanding the form and function of the patient's pathogenic beliefs historically and in the present. Such understanding is termed "person empathy" and is found to contribute to positive therapeutic outcomes. With the aim of helping to facilitate therapists' empathy regarding patients' pathogenic beliefs, we describe in this paper some of the original functions and subsequent consequences of such beliefs in patients' lives.
The insidious impact of anti-Black racism on Black peoples remain obscured by even the most well-meaning Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programming and curricula. The following inquiries guide this article: What becomes possible, in clinical settings and beyond, when the needs, dreams, and abundance of Blackness and Black peoples are tended to and affirmed? What Black technologies can be employed to cultivate the fullness of this possibility? This article will introduce readers to the Black Love and Care (BLaC) Ethic, a practical framework intended to disrupt the impacts of anti-Black racism and its intersecting oppressions by shifting how clinical practitioners practice being with Blackness. The BLaC Ethic is an invitation into a worldbuilding practice that explores what is possible when systems tend to and affirm Black experiences. The article will apply The BLaC Ethic through a reimagined clinical social work lens. The BLaC Ethic will also be explored from the perspective of "black technologies," or methods of perspectivity developed by Black peoples, such as the Afrocene, Endarkened Storywork Epistemology, and the Divine Genders Oracle Deck.
