Session: Social Work and the State: Qualitative Insights from Frontline Professionals at the Margins of State Power (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

Across geographies, social workers have long worked in mediating roles between the state and the public, variously contesting, wielding, and remaking state policy and power. Whether as a core component of the civic welfare system in democratic polities or as an internal mechanism of social governance in authoritarian regimes, social workers often occupy ambivalent positions as simultaneously state and nonstate actors. Scholarly inquiries on social work and the state have focused on the functionality of the profession in realizing the state's responsibility of caring for its citizens, the contested nature of social workers as agents of change vs. social control, the role of street-level bureaucrats in making policy, and the changes in the profession's operating mechanisms facing the neoliberal retreat of the state. This symposium brings together scholars who have conducted long-term ethnographic and qualitative fieldwork with social workers and allied professionals as they negotiate the tensions of their positions as state and nonstate actors in everyday practice. We hope that the discussions engendered by this panel allow participants to reflect on the role of social work, particularly as the field reflects on its position around abolition of some state systems. In this symposium, we ask: how are social workers figured as actors who both facilitate state programs or policies and contest state agendas? More specifically, this symposium examines the affective labor inherent in the everyday practices of frontline professionals as they mediate between the state, their clients, and the general public, often and especially in the ways they are tasked with establishing and sustaining trust in the state. We question the ways we ourselves are implicated as qualitative researchers in the political and ethical negotiations of our interlocutors, as we, like them, are variously positioned relative to state power and institutions. Symposium presenters will share qualitative insights from a diverse array of field sites that are all sites of social work practice, highlighting the way professionals at the state's margins contend with the contradictions of speaking for the state in day-to-day practice. This includes: syringe service workers negotiating tensions between state demands and activist harm reduction ideology (Anasti), the affective labor of housing case managers tasked with enrolling LGBTQ+ youth in state-funded housing programs in Detroit, Michigan (Berringer), anti-drug social workers making "recovered persons" with regard to the Party-state's agenda of constructing a drug-free society in urban China (Chen), and uncertainty amongst organizers, policy leaders, and social service professionals working to circumvent mistrust and avert an undercount in the 2020 US Decennial Census (Norwood). This topic is vital both to social work scholarship and practice as social workers continue to be indeterminately positioned inside and outside of the state in new and evolving ways. Insights from this panel contribute both to a more robust theorization of the state in relationship to social work policy and practice, as well as to a more thorough understanding of the consequences social workers experience in performing the affective labor required to mediate between the state and the public.