Harjeet Badwall PhD
Harjeet Badwall is an Associate Professor at York University’s School of Social Work in Toronto, Canada. Her areas of research focus on Race, Racism and Whiteness in Social Work, racialized and gender-based violence, practice and theory connections, interlocking analysis of violence and oppression, and post-structural theory and – Narrative therapy, ideas and practice. Harjeet worked…
Harjeet and Stephen, I very much enjoyed your conversation! Stephen thanks for arranging this interview with Harjeet and creating the space for this important topic. Harjeet, when I read your bio on the vsnt.live about the interview, I was excited—a social work professor (you) who’s work and research is grounded in critical race theory, Foucauldian discourse analysis, post-colonial theory, and other aligned framework. As a professor of social work at California State University, Sacramento I was comforted to find out there is another social work professor whose work is situated within theoretical traditions and politics.
I enjoyed the counter narrative/talking back to the social work profession in your conversation with Stephen. I really liked how you said that social workers need to expose the operations of whiteness and liberal normativity with “surgical precision.” Your critique of social work—believing/masquerading as a virtuous profession was precise and erudite. Thank you. I really like the Margolin quote you shared: “that social work imagines itself as a site of social justice.”
That quote really resonated me. Since the George Floyd murder and the subsequent protest and responses, the faculty in my social work department have been having a number of discussions on how we can have more conversations with our students about white supremacy. Your work, including your article, “Colonial Encounters,” helped me to articulate and expose the problems with the conversations we are having in my dept on anti-racism. The conversations are operating from a taken for granted assumption that social work is a righteous, anti-racist profession which hides that reality that social work is deeply embedded in white supremacy.
So, thank you. I look forward to learning more about your work. I plan on assigning your article in my class—I know it will lead to some rich conversation with my students; conversations that hopefully talk back to the hegemony of mainstream social work.
David Nylund
Thank you for a really interesting conversation. Can’t wait to read the article/paper:)