Love in the time of chaos: World-building, community, and critical participatory action research.
Caitlin Cahill
Abstract:
Our community and the extended family with whom we research, create and work alongside are under attack, threatened with deportation, displacement, and death-dealing pollution. The crisis is not new, but amplified. Within this climate of chaos, how might we imagine an emancipatory urban future rooted in community, care, and solidarity? Inspired by love and loss, our work is situated in the carceral urban geographies of the west side of Salt Lake City, Utah, the most diverse zipcode in the city, home to immigrant working class communities. Centering the knowledge of those who are most affected, our research draws upon an archive of community struggles, research projects, and public data, to map the contours of building a better world. Engaging relational ways of knowing, our documentation includes creative strategies engaged in the fight against a freeway expansion (informed by the coalition ______ Over Freeways), a place-keeping map of West Side Tesoros (or treasures) in the face of displacement, and critical participatory action research projects developed by the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective that connect intergenerational immigrant struggles against the “school-to-sweatshop pipeline” with “the right to the city” (Cahill et al 2019), understood as the right for us “to stay together, whatever happens” – “Estamos juntos pase lo que pase”(Reyna Rivarola, 2019), in community. Documenting stories, our research explores the possibility of communicating with others across traumatic boundaries, as we attempt to build solidarity one story at a time as part of a collective effort to shape change and imagine another future. As Michelle Billies (2016) explains “For if oppressions act in concert, so do forces of liberation, like so many hands tearing open a net.”
Making Connections: People, Nature and Social Work
Lena Dominelli
Abstract:
Social Work is an amazing profession. As its remit is enhancing people’s well-being, there is little that is excluded from its remit. Supporting the environment and taking care of our beautiful planet, rarely feature in daily practice. This is one aspect of the profession that green Social Work aims to change. In this session, I will consider the relevance of green perspectives regarding the planet, and how our daily practice can support individuals and families enjoy the nature they have at their doorstep, and the importance of including the physical environment people live in during any of our interventions, as I advised in Anti-Oppressive Social Work Theory and Practice, way back in 2002. My latest book to see how my thinking has developed is Social Work During Times of Disasters (Routledge, 2023).
