Sleepwalking into the ‘Post-Racial’: Social Policy and Research-Led Teaching

Abstract

Research-led teaching is the sine qua non of the 21st century university. To understand its possibilities for teaching and learning about race in Social Policy requires, as a first step, interrogating the epistemological and theoretical core of the discipline, as well as its organisational dynamics. Using parts of Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2012) framework of disciplinary reflexivity, this article traces the discipline’s habits of thought but also its lacunae in the production of racial knowledge. This entails focusing on its different forms of institutionalised and epistemological whiteness, and what has shaped the omission or marginalisation of a full understanding of the racialisation of welfare subjects and regimes in the discipline. Throughout, the article offers alternative analyses and thinking that fully embrace the historical and contemporary role of race, racism, and nation in lived realities, institutional processes, and global racial orders. It concludes with pointers towards a re-envisioning of Social Policy, within a framework in which postcolonial and intersectional theory and praxis are championed. Only then might a decolonised curriculum be possible in which race is not peripheral to core teaching and learning.

Editors’ introduction: 10 years of the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy (2013–2022) – taking stock and charting a route forward

“…For example, concepts initially developed in the process of studying formal welfare states in the Global North remain highly applicable thinking tools also in the context of the Global South, and vice versa: concepts and approaches more commonly grounded in the analysis of social policy and international development studies in the Global South could be extended in the study of the Global North. In part, this might also involve the need to “provincialise” (Chakrabarty, 2007) the often-privileged role Western experiences play in the analysis of welfare states even in the Global South and to embrace alternative conceptual frames – postcolonial/decolonial, intersectional, ecological – that bring to light the implicit assumptions that continue to inform much social policy research (Phillips & Williams, 2022; Williams, 2021). In other words, the aim is not to devalue or divert from the current research trajectories but to interleave the insights from different regional and historical perspectives to support cross-fertilisation across the empirical experiences drawn from the Global North and Global South.…”

Multiple barriers to the Dutch welfare state. Black Feminists’ intersectional claims to social citizenship in the 1980s

“…The magazines literally rendered visible the increasing presence of Black families in the Dutch welfare state, some of which were “non-normative” and had differing social rights claims. Putting that diversity central, helps to challenge the “whitened logic” that has persisted in European welfare state scholarship, in the sense that central concepts such as care and family “are based upon white, hetero-normative experiences which are then generalised to the universal” (Phillips and Williams, 2022: 29).…”

Teaching social policy as if students matter: Decolonizing the curriculum and perpetuating epistemic injustice

“…In their contribution to the Social Policy & Society Special Issue on teaching race in Social Policy Coretta Phillips and Fiona Williams observe that ‘When it comes to concepts, ideas and values, the core of Social Policy also tends to reflect a whitened logic. That is to say, whiteness is the plumbline against which all other (non-white, non-middle-class) communities are measured’ (2021: 4; also see Williams, 2016). In light of these considerations, I consider the demands to decolonize the curriculum as a challenge to rethink not only the history of Social Policy, but also as a demand to theorize Social Policy differently by deconstructing its colonial and colonizing mindset which is imbued with racialized assumptions.…”