Disrupting Epistemic Injustice in Social Work Scholarship: Race, Meaning, and Method

This seminar will provide structured opportunities for students to identify and disrupt racialized forms of epistemic injustice--testimonial and hermeneutical--in the practice of social work research generally, and in “anti-racist” research specifically. Grounded in critical-intersectionality and a dialectical class process, we will explore social identity power throughout the production of scholarship and its harm in exaggerating or silencing the capacity of varied knowers and of knowledge itself. Students are encouraged to identify core dimensions of epistemic injustice, including racialized epistemologies of ignorance and expertise in their own areas of research, including potential dissertation projects, and all students using any methodology are welcomed. Students will similarly deepen their critical reflexive stance toward the methods and meanings of “race” and “racism” and tensions in democratizing knowledge within their projects and their own interpretive points of reference. Our collective work in this seminar is to envision what epistemically just social work scholarship might look like and identify necessary transformations in our fields, our science-producing systems, and ourselves. Recommended Prerequisite (may be taken concurrently): SSAD 56601 Theory in Research.