Toronto Launch - Abolish Social Work (As We Know It)

Between The Lines and Another Story Bookshop present the Toronto launch of Abolish Social Work (As We Know It) edited by Craig Fortier, Edward Hon-Sing Wong and MJ Rwigema
More information about speakers coming soon!
Books will be for sale and participating editors and contributors will be signing!
Abolish Social Work (As We Know It) responds to the timely and important call for police abolition by analyzing professional social work as one alternative commonly proposed as a ready-made solution to ending police brutality. Drawing on both historical analysis and lessons learned from decades of organizing abolitionist and decolonizing practices within the field and practice of social work (including social service, community organizing, and other helping fields), this book is an important contribution in the discussion of what abolitionist social work could look like. This edited volume brings together predominantly BIPOC and queer/trans* social work survivors, community-based activists, educators, and frontline social workers to propose both an abolitionist framework for social work practice and a transformative framework that calls for the dissolution and restructuring of social work as a profession.
Rejecting the practices and values encapsulated by professional social work as embedded in carceral and colonial systems, Abolish Social Work (As We Know It) moves us towards a social work framework guided by principles of mutual aid, accountability, and relationality led by Indigenous, Black, queer/trans*, racialized, immigrant, disabled, poor and other communities for whom social work has inserted itself into their lives.
Please register here on Eventbrite.
Praise for Abolish Social Work
“Social movements are coalescing around the crucial work of struggling for abolitionist futures, based around the vital maxims of ‘care not cops,’ and ‘support not punishment.’ But what kind of care and support are we orienting toward? Abolish Social Work (As We Know It) helps to clarify these liberatory visions by engaging in the critical and careful work of assessing the carceral complicities at work in the ‘caring professions’ writ large. The authors provide both a trenchant critique of social work as it has historically evolved, and a transformative vision for what caring could mean.” – Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives and co-author of Rehearsals for Living; assistant professor, Department of Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Toronto