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.”
Contested Memories: Writing the History of Social Work through Marginalised Biographies
Irene Messinger
Abstract:
Around the turn of the 20th century, the emergence of social work as a profession marked a significant transformation across European societies. Its development was closely intertwined with the women’s movement with women founding institutions, shaping theories, and entering the public sphere
as welfare professionals. Whose story is being told when writing the history of social work? Recent critiques from the US of the “whitewashing” of the profession’s past have highlighted the dominance of White and upper-class narratives, overlooking the diverse contributions of marginalized women. Following the First World War, Vienna became a laboratory for ambitious municipal reform. The period of “Red Vienna” (1919–1934) saw a rapid expansion of public welfare infrastructure — from health care nd housing to youth welfare and professional training. Both public authorities and private, often denominational institutions contributed to a dense network of social provision.
With the rise of Austrofascism in 1934 and the National Socialist regime in 1938, this development was violently interrupted. While many public welfare workers remained in service and aligned themselves with the new regimes, others — particularly Jewish and leftist women — were dismissed, persecuted, or forced into exile. Their biographies offer alternative, intersectional narratives that challenge dominant accounts and reveal social work’s historical entanglement with oppression and resistance.
