Social Work History Network event montage Photo: Edgar Colomba
Joe Hanley

Joe Hanley (The Open University)
on behalf of Social Work History Network – a community of social workers, historians, archivists, researchers, educators, students and policymakers (founded 2000, UK).

Social Work Histories of Complicity and Resistance

Social Work History Network, in collaboration with the US-based Social Welfare History Group, hosted an online event on 24 September 2024 titled “Social Work Histories of Complicity and Resistance.” Across the 90 minutes, roughly 200 people were in attendance at any one time. I was one of them.

The event was admirably chaired by David Jones (SWHN) and Stephen Monroe Tomczak (SWHG). From the outset, attendees were encouraged to introduce themselves in the chat, which quickly filled with voices from Greece, Sweden, Canada, USA, Germany, England, Lebanon, South Africa, Switzerland, Australia, Nigeria, Finland, Turkey, Mauritius, Austria, Sudan and Chile.

The inspiration came from the collaborative volume Social Work’s Histories of Complicity and Resistance: A Tale of Two Professions (Policy Press, 2023), featuring 17 chapters chronicling the profession’s complex past. Fittingly, the first speaker was editor Vasilios Ioakimidis (University of Essex), who described the soul-searching involved. He framed social work as a two-faced “Janus”: implicated at times in state violence, yet always containing those who resist. His core message: social work remains a profession worth fighting for.

Jane McPherson (University of Georgia) presented a 1960s US case study of what she termed “well-intentioned complicity,” exploring how obedience to authority, shaped by race and class, contributed to harm in urban renewal—now the subject of reparations. She challenged us to consider which current practices might be viewed as “atrocities” in future.

From Chile, Gianinna Muñoz-Arce (University of Chile) drew on work co-authored with Melisa Campana-Alabarce (National University of Rosario), focusing on social work under the 1973–1990 dictatorship. Chile, she noted, served as a “lab” for neoliberalism that later globalised. Crucially, social workers injected critical knowledge as a form of resistance.

Mimi Abramovitz (Hunter College, Emerita) then connected historical reflections to contemporary US events. Her warning—democracy often erodes not in one blow, but by “a thousand cuts”—felt chillingly prescient.

The event took place just six weeks before Donald Trump’s election to a second term. Since then, we have witnessed both an acceleration of those “cuts” and, importantly, people coming together to challenge, dissent, resist and support one another.

The chat throughout the event was electric—stories and experiences of complicity and resistance from around the world, connections made, contact details exchanged. In a forum where collective resistance was a recurring theme, watching those connections form was hopeful. As the session closed, it felt less like an ending and more like a beginning—something we need now more than ever.

Reference

  1. Ioakimidis, V., & Wyllie, A. (Eds.). (2023). Social Work’s Histories of Complicity and Resistance: A Tale of Two Professions. Policy Press.