Unsettling Social Work Innocence: Reading Jessie Taft at the Margins of History
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Abstract
This study was an exploration of our aspiration to write a different kind of social work history, one that unsettles the usual formulations focused on drawing distinctions between valorized heroes and condemned villains; binaries that produce tales flattened of complexity. Through the reexamination of a few strands of the life and work of Jessie Taft (1882–1960), a figure both celebrated—as a feminist, “lesbian foremother,” and an architect of modern social work—and neglected in the field’s understanding of its development as a profession, we endeavored to engage in a more nuanced kind of story-making apparatus, focused on reading the traces at the margins of traditional histories. We paid attention to the silences and exclusions rather than relying on presences and assertions; we read both as imbrications rather than contradictions, resisting the will to power that renders nuance a problem. Uncritical acceptance of the benevolent founding of social work, we argue, forecloses our capacity to acknowledge its long history of perpetuating racisms, nationalisms, and imperialisms, and much more. It, more importantly, impedes our ability to struggle candidly with their formulations in the present day.
Bibliography: Park, Yoosun/Chatterjee, Alicia: Unsettling Social Work Innocence: Reading Jessie Taft at the Margins of History, Zeitschrift für erziehungswissenschaftliche Migrationsforschung (ZeM), 1-2026, pp. 9-22.
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Title: Unsettling Social Work Innocence: Reading Jessie Taft at the Margins of History
Issue: Jg. 5, Nr. 1-2026: Koloniale Wissensarchive. Zur Auseinandersetzung mit historischen Verflechtungen von Sozialer Arbeit und Pädagogik in der postkolonialen Migrationsgesellschaft