Strategic Epistemic Activism to Advance LGBTQ+ Affirming Care: Between Cold Hard Facts & Situated Knowledges

Background: This study follows practitioners, program developers, and advocates at an LGBTQ+ youth center in metropolitan Detroit working at the intersection of social work practice, research, and policy advocacy. This inherently collaborative work is focused on advancing what practitioners call “embedded systems change” in local, state, and national institutions serving LGBTQ+ youth, including child welfare agencies. This study seeks to explore how practitioners engaging in collaborative projects deploy two, sometimes competing, knowledge production paradigms. The first is an objectivist and behaviorist one, privileging observable and measurable phenomena, and the other is a situated knowledges paradigm, rooted in feminist epistemological and activist traditions, which insists on considering the social positionality of knowledge producers and the epistemic value of embodied knowledge, grounded in lived experience. Thus, this paper highlights and examines one particular set of tensions emerging in social work collaboration, which proves both productive and risky for social work practitioners.

Methods: This presentation draws on data from over two years of ethnographic research at an LGBTQ+ youth center working to design, implement, and evaluate social service interventions tailored to LGBTQ+ youth in various systems of care, including the child welfare system, homelessness services systems, healthcare systems, and the juvenile justice system. This research involved over 120 in-depth interviews with key staff members and extensive participant-observation in organizational activities – including assisting in program evaluation and observing dozens of training and coaching sessions with child welfare workers. Ethnographic data from this study, including interview transcripts, ethnographic fieldnotes, and archival documents, were analyzed using an iterative, inductive approach, informed by grounded theory.

Results: This study finds that social work practitioners deployed two competing epistemological and methodological paradigms, despite their potential contradictions, as a part of a coherent and intentional strategy to effect particular social and institutional change. As such, an epistemologically and methodologically pluralist approach was central to practitioners’ strategic epistemic activism. At the same time, this study reveals practitioners’ attention to the potential harms of deploying and elevating objectivist paradigms to produce LGBTQ+ knowledge and effect change, particularly the harms of epistemic injustice.

Conclusions: Emerging scholarship across areas of social work practice has taken up the philosophical concept of epistemic injustice to analyze how social power operates to marginalize individuals and groups in their capacity as knowers. This concept has been further developed by queer and trans theorists to analyze the particular forms of silencing, dismissal, and medical gatekeeping LGBTQ+ people, and especially trans people, experience. This study highlights how the concept of epistemic injustice became critical for social work practitioners’ evaluation of the ethics of their own practice, and their negotiation of when and how to deploy competing epistemological paradigms. In this way, this study illustrates how tensions emerging in collaboration can be both productive and potentially risky. These findings suggest a need for further attention to the ethics of collaborative knowledge-making in social work research, education, and training, so that social work practitioners might better consider how their practice reinforces – or subverts – existing knowledge hierarchies and epistemic marginalization.