Abolition As Practice: An Anti-Carceral Social Work Learning Community

Background and Purpose: Abolition is quickly becoming a central topic in social work education. Discussion of the complicity of social work in carceral approaches, social work values and ethics, and social work’s role in policing and other systems that criminalize clients and communities can be found in the peer-reviewed literature, in social media, and across our academic programs. These discussions often focus on abolition as an ideology, with minimal attention given to abolition as a practice. While thinking abolition is important, as social workers we must apply theory to our work so that doing abolition is an everyday part of social work pedagogy and practice.

A semester-long (15-week) MSW-level elective class was taught during Spring 2024 titled “Abolition and Responses to Harm for Social Work Practice.” Class topics included social work, mutual aid, restorative and transformative justice, harm reduction, the criminalization of immigration, and radical imagination. To center current and community-generated content, course materials included videos/webinars, blog posts, peer-reviewed literature, podcasts, and other multimedia, as well as guest speakers. The class was taught hybrid, with the first 13 sessions happening over Zoom and the last two in person.

Methods: This presentation will report on two rounds of data collection - a mid-semester survey and a post-semester survey and focus group. Data were collected from first-year, part-time, and advanced standing MSW students (N=12). Google forms were used to collect survey data and the focus group was conducted via Zoom. Audio from the focus group was transcribed and uploaded into Atlas.ti 9 for analysis, and an inductive approach was used to create codes and themes using The quantitative data collected through the mid and post-semester surveys was analyzed for descriptives only using Microsoft Excel.

Results: Students report that 1) the class helped them to think about ways to resist carceral thinking in their everyday practice, 2) the guest speakers were significant to their learning and presented information and/or viewpoints they had not encountered previously, and 3) teaching style/intentional development of a learning community was essential to feeling safe and maintaining a learning edge during class sessions. Students also reported that a fully in-person class was preferred to the hybrid format.

Conclusions and Implications: For the deep changes needed to realize an abolitionist future, we must start with every day, small changes that shift social work practice. Social work values support abolitionist and anti-carceral practice, and learning communities with social work students can provide a safe space for “doing” abolition. Social work students are increasingly seeking ways to make structural change.