Session: Mobilizing Organizational Archives to Build an Anti-Racist Future: An Methodological Exploration (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

In recent decades social work has abandoned two important lenses for research, policy, and practice: the study of organizations and the study of history. Once central to how social workers situated the profession, scholars have largely pivoted from investing in organizational and historical analyses to focus on treating individuals within the evidence-based practice movement. This symposium emphasizes historical and organizational analyses as central to actualizing the aims of social work- interrogating societal inequities and advancing a more just society. While underscoring the value of organizational and historical work, we do not silo these approaches. Instead, this symposium demonstrates how they are overlapping, mutually benefiting pursuits. The historical archives that reflect our profession do not represent individual practitioner motivations or intentions; they largely reflect organizational processes. These untapped archives are an opportunity for epistemic justice, on one hand providing insight into the contributions of marginalized organizational forms within the profession including mutual aid groups, social movements, community-based organizations, and organizations run by social workers of color and, on the other hand, providing an opportunity for researchers to critically reflect on the largely white-run organizations that have institutionalized the profession's logics and practices. Within organizational studies has been an influx of critical thought underscoring organizations as sites of equitable social change and social inequity. While this work has produced contemporary ideas, we argue that these ideas are not contemporary happenings. A historical analysis of non-profit merges, the mobilization of evidence, and the institutionalization of practices can extend contemporary, influential ideas within organizational studies. Each symposium paper will serve as a case study for how to leverage organizational archives and conduct a historical analysis to shed light on foundational questions in social work. Presenter 1 illuminated the "black-box" of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and identified practices for how CDA can be used to interrogate racializing organizational processes. Presenter 2 traced the legacy of contemporary data-driven governance in child welfare through an interdisciplinary analysis of a Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children annual report. Drawing upon the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of over 100 incidents of police violence, Presenter 3 decolonized police violence research by leveraging untapped sources of organizational data. Lastly, Presenter 4 built a multi-archival, organizationally-focused data set to analyze social work's response to the Brown v. Board Supreme Court rulings. The first two presenters foreground archival approaches to the study of organizations as findings while the third and fourth presenters demonstrate how distinct methods can facilitate historical analyses of organizations. Since this work has been largely abandoned within social work, we think it important to prioritize showing how an historical analysis of organizations can be done. In addition to sharing empirical findings, each of these papers offer an "under the hood" examination of how social work scholars ask historical-organizational questions, leverage historical archives to address essential questions of power, and identify implications for contemporary practice.