Soziale Arbeit als Zivilisierungsmission. Postkoloniale Perspektiven

Abstract

Social Work as a Civilizing Mission. Postcolonial Perspectives
This article examines the history and development of social work from a postcolonial perspective. It argues that social work should not only be understood as a response to the social crises of industrial modernity, but also as a field deeply entangled with colonial knowledge orders, nation-state projects, and racialized regimes of difference. Drawing on historical examples from the German colonial movement and the bourgeois women’s movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the article demonstrates how feminist emancipation projects were partly intertwined with imperial and colonial power relations. In addition, the article discusses contemporary debates in the German-speaking context that frame postcolonial theory and antisemitism critique as opposing perspectives. It argues that critical social work scholarship must engage with these tensions while maintaining a theoretically grounded postcolonial analysis of the profession. Such an approach allows colonial continuities within professional self-understandings to be identified and encourages a historically informed critique of social work as a field shaped by power relations.

Keywords: postcolonial theory, history of social work, colonialism, feminism, social work studies, racism critique

Bibliography: do Mar Castro Varela, María: Soziale Arbeit als Zivilisierungsmission. Postkoloniale Perspektiven, Zeitschrift für erziehungswissenschaftliche Migrationsforschung (ZeM), 1-2026, pp. 23-37.