Abolition & Social Work Book Release!
NAASW is a proud to contributor to this "critical anthology exploring the debates, conundrums, and promising practices around abolition and social work. Featuring a foreword by Mariame Kaba, Abolition and Social Work offers an orientation to abolitionist theory for social workers and explores the tensions and paradoxes in realizing abolitionist practice in social work—a necessary intervention in contemporary discourse regarding carceral social work, and a compass for recentering this work through the lens of abolition, transformative justice, and collective care." Coming April 30th!
Free Palestine!
As social workers invested in dismantling harmful systems and building liberatory ones, we demand an end to ongoing US- Israeli occupation and genocide against Palestinian people and lands. We resist complicity, propaganda, and the repression and criminalization of protest, and call on our friends, communities, organizations, institutions, and electeds to do the same.
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Our struggles toward abolition and liberation are connected on a global scale. We invite social workers everywhere to join us in solidarity with Palestinian people through listening, learning, and joining struggles for a free Palestine.
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Visit Social Work for Palestine to learn more and take action!
Our latest on Instagram
WHO WE
ARE
The Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW) strives to amplify a practice of social work aimed at dismantling the prison industrial complex (PIC) and building the life-affirming horizon to which abolition aspires. Our efforts include:
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Ongoing political education
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Research / knowledge generation around carceral and abolition social work
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Developing an online hub of abolitionist social work resources
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Broader organizing and advocacy efforts to insert abolitionist ideas and practices into social work.
We recognize “social work” to include all workers who identify with the field — from social service workers to organizers, clinicians to policy makers, and those with and without social work degrees or licenses.
Abolitionist social work partners in the work of ending state and institutional violence, while supporting life- affirming relationships, practices and organizing. We are committed to working towards a social work rooted in solidarity over charity, one that is decolonized, de-professionalized, anti-capitalist, and is committed to accountability, reparations, and continual transformation. This requires that social work become unrecognizable from its current form.
WHAT IS ABOLITIONIST SOCIAL WORK?
Data Report
In the spring of 2021, we launched a survey of social work to understand more about how social work(ers) perpetuate and / or are complicit in criminalization, and how social work(ers) are engaging in abolitionist work. We are grateful to the over 400 survey participants. Please read and share our full report published in March 2022 entitled "Challenging Carceral Social Work and the Struggle for Abolition."