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COVID-19 has exposed the inequalities and polarisation of South African communities and institutions of higher learning on the continuum of privilege. As nine social work educators, we share our reflections on how we traversed the higher education space during the beginning of the pandemic, using an autoethnography lens, with the pedagogy of discomfort and critical social work theory as the threads in the complex tapestry of our stories. We describe our orientations as social work educators, the successes, challenges, and recommendations on reimagining and reframing learning and teaching in relation to student-institutional relationships, boundaries and support.

There has been a link between nutrition styles and human health and physical features for centuries. Similarly, there has been a connection between the easiness and difficulty to reach food materials, and shortage and abundance of these material and human behaviors and moral structure. One of the efforts to make a connection between these qualifications comes from Ibn Khaldun. A thinker of Islam, Ibn Khaldun, who lived in the 18 th century, stated that moral characteristics and physical features in the communities which are deprived of food materials are higher than those of the communities having a wealthy living. According to him, overeating leads to the accumulation of harmful wastes in the body and thus to the deterioration of both physical and mental health of human being. Therefore, eating abundant food materials might not result in positive results for man. In the current study, it was investigated how the opportunities of reaching abundant food and types of nutrition affected human health in general and moral structure in Ibn Khaldun.

Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to the social work profession. It has been well established that social workers can play a crucial role in redressing challenges faced by sexual minorities. Nevertheless, little is known about the roles of social workers in advocating social justice of sexual minorities in practice, particularly in South Africa. In this study, we therefore aimed to gain an understanding of social workers’ perceptions of their role to advocate social justice of sexual minorities. This article is extracted from a qualitative study with a sample of 16 social workers who were selected purposively. For the professional social workers to be eligible to participate in the study, they needed to be registered with the South African Council for Social Service Professions, provide services to sexual minorities, work as social workers for at least one year, and speak and communicate in English. The data presented in this article were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings of the study indicate that social workers perceive their role in advocating social justice of sexual minorities to include being an advocate, educator and broker. In addition, the findings reflect that social work professionals are confronted with personal and religious beliefs and the scope of practice as barriers to efficiently execute their roles when advocating social justice of sexual minorities. We conclude that social workers need to advocate social justice of sexual minorities at a policy level to move them from micro intervention practice to a macro practice intervention. Based on the findings of the study, we recommend that social work education and practicum cultivate advocacy skills for the social justice of sexual minorities.