Rooting Deeply and Explicitly in Our Principles: An Asian American Feminist Epistemology for Social Work Scholarship

Background and purpose:

For feminist social work scholars, the question of how we engage a praxis of critical care, relationships and solidarity, and resistance and transformation in our scholarship seems a critical one in meeting this political moment–in the wake of ongoing and escalated violence toward the communities we work with, are part of, and care about. I turn to Gita Mehrotra’s (2023) reminder that “how we do the work is the work”; that is, the process through which we do research, and not solely its topics and outcomes, is an important part of our critical feminist social work praxis.

In this paper, I propose key features of an Asian American feminist epistemology for social work scholarship. I highlight these key features through methodological insights from a narrative study with young Asian American women in the Chicago area. This study engaged storytelling methods (“Where I’m from” poems, Story Circles) in a group workshop setting to explore how participants have been politically activated to work towards changing the conditions of inequity that shape their worlds—through organizing, activism, and community-engaged work.

An Asian American feminist epistemology for social work scholarship:

Asian American feminisms is grounded in the dynamic and multifaceted ways that Asian Americans (especially women, queer people, and/or gender expansive people) confront and address systems of power at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, im/migration, disability, and religion. I draw on methodological reflections from study participants and researchers to map four key features of an Asian American feminist epistemology for social work scholarship: 1) self-articulation and self-definition; 2) “theory in the flesh” (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983), or knowledge from embodied and emotional lived experiences; 3) knowledge through relationship and care; and 4) difference, multiplicity, and complexity as analytical and coalitional lens. The epistemological features emphasized in this paper are grounded in principles of Asian American and Women of Color (WOC) feminist thought. The care to process and how we do social work scholarship as a part of critical feminist praxis runs as an undercurrent of the proposed Asian American feminist epistemology.

Conclusions and implications:

To meet this moment of state-sanctioned attacks on the livelihoods and wellbeing of our communities, we must root deeply and explicitly in our feminist social work principles. As social work scholars, explicitly and deeply engaging an Asian American feminist epistemology means proliferating care, resistance, and solidarity within the doing of our research. I emphasize that how we embody critical feminist social work values in the doing/process of our scholarship becomes a part of the change we want to see in our worlds. How we cultivate relational ways of being, knowing, and doing in the research process reflects the relational ways of being, knowing, and doing we seed as antidote to damaging structures of oppression.