This week, I began my last year in my Master’s in Social Work (MSW) program at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work. In my time there, I have been able to lend disability justice, culture, and advocacy efforts to social work scholarship easily. And yet, the field of social work has yet to adopt disability justice pedagogy to its curriculum. With the rise of racial unrest of the 2010s to now, we have seen the social work profession work to align itself as radical by adopting anti-racist and decolonization strategies in its curriculum. Among these ideas, radical social work also teaches the importance of understanding how hypersegregation and resource inequality play a part in the development of people. Furthermore, the ideas of a livable wage and housing security are taught to future social workers to illustrate the goals that contemporary activists work to achieve the goals of a social work education.
All of these different pieces of social justice work taught to MSW students aim to help students understand the populations that regularly seek supports without specific instruction on how they interact with the disability community. People with disabilities are at higher risks of needing social justice work in receiving services. How can MSW students hope to do actual social justice work if their education does not teach them the intersection of all the previous components by centering disability justice education?
The disability community is rich in examples of how people performing radical social work can truly provide supports for disabled folk. Social workers are already taught how to function in interdisciplinary teams; shouldn’t they also know about how to provide care coordination in anti-ableist ways? As disability activism shifts from a disability rights framework into seeking anti-capitalist disability justice, shouldn’t social workers know how to work within those frameworks? Shouldn’t social workers know how to apply anti-oppressive practices that disabled people have and continue to experience through an educational approach instead of a #FreeBritney Twitter thread detailing the lack of bodily autonomy adults with disabilities experience?
Special topics within the disability community like right to marry, benefits determinations, subminimum wage work, etc., should be a required curriculum component that future social workers should not miss in their education. All social workers should be able to help support the self-determination of people with disabilities in order to provide anti-ableist disability justice.
