Queer South Asian Social Work Praxis

Background and Purpose:

We are two queer, South Asian American, cisgender women doing / teaching / researching social work with/in South Asian American communities. Given the dearth of research on queer South Asian communities, we take up and extend Mehrotra’s (2022) call to build intersectional queer praxis for critical feminist scholarship, specifically in the South Asian diasporic context. Queer praxis – which centers the dialectical relationship between theory and practice – is processual, emergent, and rooted in the principle “how we do the work is the work.” Drawing from intersectional feminist theorizing, queer of color critique, and anti-oppressive social work frameworks, we seek to conceptualize a queer social work praxis informed by and responsive to heterogenous South Asian diasporic communities.

Methods:

We employed a duoethnographic research design to facilitate intergenerational dialogues between two queer South Asian social work scholars, one PhD candidate and one tenured professor. Duoethnography refers to a collaborative qualitative methodology in which two researchers are engaged in dialogue and critical self-reflection to make meaning of a shared experience, while attending to multiplicity and social difference. Duoethnography combines elements of autobiography and ethnographic examination of cultural worlds, and it is an emergent methodology in social work research used to destabilize the dichotomy between researcher-researched. We facilitated a series of six semi-structured 90 minute dialogues between 2024-25 in order to examine how our socialization and lived experiences as queer South Asian American women have shaped the development of our social work values, vision, and praxis. We structured each dialogue around the principles of queer praxis outlined in Mehrotra’s (2022) article and engaged in reflective journaling after each conversation. We coded and analyzed the dialogue transcripts and journal entries using critical reflexive thematic analysis.

Findings:

We illustrate how personal and professional experiences of navigating insider/outsider status in academia, the (white) feminist anti-violence movement, (heteronormative) South Asian community spaces, and queer of color activist movements shaped our development of a queer, South Asian social work praxis. We conceptualize queer on two registers: queer as an identity descriptor, and to queer as an action verb – to destabilize hegemonic norms and offer new possibilities for social work theory and practice. Elaborating on Mehrotra’s (2022) framework, we describe four interrelated elements of queer social work praxis in the South Asian diasporic context: 1) reimagining time, 2) centering relationships and community care, 3) embracing complexity and disrupting binaries, and 4) attending to embodiment and emotion. Finally, we provide case examples of how we have applied these principles in our research collaboration, in our direct practice with South Asian survivors of domestic violence, and in our social work pedagogy in and out of the classroom.

Implications & Conclusions:

Our emergent framework offers theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and practice insights for queer South Asian social workers and social workers looking to queer their social work praxis with South Asian communities in the diaspora.