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<p>Decolonization exposes the ontological and epistemic vulnerabilities at the heart of contemporary social work. Historically shaped by Enlightenment rationalities and structurally entangled with colonial frameworks, the discipline’s moral and cognitive foundations remain inseparable from Eurocentric universalism, generating relentless tensions between egalitarian ideals and hierarchical practices. Recent critiques of social work education indicate not only curricular revision but also the destabilization of the epistemic and ethical scaffolding that bolsters its professional legitimacy. The argument advanced here contends that the discipline’s survival does not hinge on defending inherited paradigms or achieving epistemic purity, but on cultivating philosophical dissent and epistemic hybridity as constitutive modalities of practice. Through a genealogical reading, the paper traces how universalist moral frameworks and recognition-oriented dialectics historically shaped social work’s ambivalent identity, committed to moral equality and complicit in hierarchies of knowing and caring. The analytic lens then winds through the interstices of hybridity and epistemic friction, conceptualizing social work as a site where competing knowledges meet, tension becomes generative, and meaning emerges through relational negotiation. Attending to the entanglements of power, knowledge, and governance, the paper situates professional practice within systems that discipline both practitioners and subjects, highlighting possibilities for counter-hegemonic praxis that reclaim the emancipatory potential of the field. Decolonization, framed as a dialectical Aufhebung, requires that social work unsettle its colonial inheritance while simultaneously preserving and rearticulating its moral purpose. Survival, in this sense, demands neither the complete rejection of universality nor the uncritical turn toward relativism, but a reflexive, polyphonic practice inextricably linked to relationality, epistemic pluralism, and ethical negotiation across diverse moral worlds.</p>

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Can Social Work Survive Decolonization? Toward an Aufhebung of Ethics and Epistemology Beyond Coloniality

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月4日

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  • Areeb Habib Khan

摘要

Decolonization exposes the ontological and epistemic vulnerabilities at the heart of contemporary social work. Historically shaped by Enlightenment rationalities and structurally entangled with colonial frameworks, the discipline’s moral and cognitive foundations remain inseparable from Eurocentric universalism, generating relentless tensions between egalitarian ideals and hierarchical practices. Recent critiques of social work education indicate not only curricular revision but also the destabilization of the epistemic and ethical scaffolding that bolsters its professional legitimacy. The argument advanced here contends that the discipline’s survival does not hinge on defending inherited paradigms or achieving epistemic purity, but on cultivating philosophical dissent and epistemic hybridity as constitutive modalities of practice. Through a genealogical reading, the paper traces how universalist moral frameworks and recognition-oriented dialectics historically shaped social work’s ambivalent identity, committed to moral equality and complicit in hierarchies of knowing and caring. The analytic lens then winds through the interstices of hybridity and epistemic friction, conceptualizing social work as a site where competing knowledges meet, tension becomes generative, and meaning emerges through relational negotiation. Attending to the entanglements of power, knowledge, and governance, the paper situates professional practice within systems that discipline both practitioners and subjects, highlighting possibilities for counter-hegemonic praxis that reclaim the emancipatory potential of the field. Decolonization, framed as a dialectical Aufhebung, requires that social work unsettle its colonial inheritance while simultaneously preserving and rearticulating its moral purpose. Survival, in this sense, demands neither the complete rejection of universality nor the uncritical turn toward relativism, but a reflexive, polyphonic practice inextricably linked to relationality, epistemic pluralism, and ethical negotiation across diverse moral worlds.