Collaborative Social Work Research Practice and Community Organizing: Paving the Path Towards Decolonization from Filipinx Perspectives

Despite being the third largest growing migrant population in Canada, Filipino-Canadians are underrepresented in many spaces including in research. This underrepresentation has shaped the contour of (in/hyper)visibility, the being, and becoming a Filipino/a/x (Coloma et al., 2012), and of how we come to understand our own (hi)stories and generate knowledge about ourselves as migrants, settlers, and uninvited guests to Turtle Island. In the past few years, the emerging scholarship and advocacy have been increasingly led by/with and for the Filipino diaspora, which presents hope for and challenge how collaborative research can be critically forged as it impacts our and more broadly, Indigenous, Black and racialized communities, and unsettles our own disciplines on the tools for, and objectives of knowledge creation/utilization. In this roundtable conversation, four social work graduate scholars and practitioners from the Filipino diaspora will share their insights and experiences on building collaborative research on issues around: queering community-based research methods, knowledge creation, and cultural production; contested diaspora nationalisms and movement-building; community organizing and resistance; and understanding the political economies of community research. Collectively, we reflect on the questions: how do we enact critical and decolonial approaches and practice in our social work settings? In what ways do our cultural and material ways of knowing and relating offer advantages and dilemmas to our ethical practices of decolonization and social justice? How might we build solidarity, relationality, reciprocity, and non-extractive research practices? The circle facilitators will begin with analyses of (de)colonization through the context of colonial and imperial histories in the Philippines related to migration regimes that have dispersed Filipinos globally, and contributed to settlement on Indigenous lands in Canada. Drawing from critical, feminist and queer, decolonial, and transnational frameworks, the circle facilitators will conclude with how they have sought to center Filipino epistemologies, ethics of solidarity praxis, and social justice in their social and community research and practices, and in leaning on each other. Jacqueline Stol revisits the challenges and possibilities of queer diaspora and decolonial praxis in social and community work in reflecting on her community-based dissertation process documenting community organizing among LGBTQ+ Filipinos in Montreal. As a former temporary foreign worker, Nellie Alcaraz will share her learnings and experiences in community organizing and how they impact her social work research/practice in Indigenous and racialized communities, and vice versa. Alyssa Schenk explores the ways in which her activism in the youth and student sector of the National Democratic Movement of the Philippines is pivotal and central to her commitment to decolonization as a social worker and educator in so-called Canada. Anabelle Ragsag explores in her research how Southeast Asian single mothers participating in Ontario Works navigate and are being impacted by digital welfare surveillance systems (Alston 2019), a study that is shaped by her own experiences of growing up in, and as an adult studying and working with communities subjected to poverty and technologies of poverty governance.