Radical Social Work and Asian Americans: An Examination of Practice, Politics, and the Paradox of the Profession

This study investigates the practices that radical Asian American social workers undertake in response to the dilemmas that arise between their political beliefs and the social work profession. Based on interviews with ten activist social workers selected through snowball and criterion sampling, this project asks: How are radical Asian American social workers shaping their practice based on a reimagination of the field? This study responds to the paucity of social work literature on Asian American practitioners, especially as related to the social work profession’s heightened contradictions in the time of neoliberalism. It remains clear that there is much for social work to learn from Asian Americans who have more radical agendas for change. Heeding Robert Mullaly and Eric Keating’s (1991) call that “radical social workers work both inside and outside the welfare state” (p. 69), I argue that radical Asian American social work encompasses three modes of practice: infrapolitics and insurgency, healing work as political practice, and political and community organizing. Within the welfare state, interviewees engage in subversive practices, or infrapolitics and insurgency, to help protect and empower themselves and the people with whom they work. Interviewees also take part in healing work as political practice by invoking family history and radical imaginations in a typically ahistorical space. Their organizing work takes place outside traditional service organizations and involves organizing social work colleagues as well as addressing social and political forces that affect their communities’ lives. Ultimately, the work of radical Asian American social workers lead us to identify the ways white supremacy have shaped the contemporary field’s lens and refuse to comply with practices we know harm communities our own or otherwise. Instead, we will offer critiques of the current structures and begin building alternate modes of practice to empower and survive, pending revolution