Session: Stories for Transformative Change: Feminist Narrative Methods As Epistemological Resistance (Society for Social Work and Research 30th Annual Conference Anniversary)

In recent decades, social work has moved away from storytelling as a lens to understand direct practice, community organizing, and policy formation. Once central to how social workers understood social change at the micro, mezzo and macro levels, the profession has experienced a neoliberal shift away from narrative methods toward clinical treatment of individuals within the evidence-based practice movement. This symposium aims to reemphasize and honor the role of feminist narrative methods in creating a more just world, underscoring how critical feminisms have long used narrative as a care practice and political organizing method. Our symposium is oriented around three core tenets of feminist narrative methods: 1) storytelling is a process-oriented approach grounded in building community narratives and counter-narratives that connect the personal with the political, rather than focusing on (decontextualized) individual outcomes; 2) narrative is an analytic tool to understand how individual and collective experiences are shaped by historical-structural power arrangements; and 3) narrative practice builds knowledge from "below" to counter structures of power. In organizing a symposium around feminist narrative methods, we do not aim to silo the work to academic disciplines and instead underscore that these traditions originate from and innovate outside the academy. Each symposium paper will serve as a case study for engaging feminist narrative approaches in social work research, and through our practice of reflexivity, demonstrate engagement with these approaches at different stages of the research process. The first presenter reflects on the use of participatory mapping as a tool for narrative inquiry by bridging Black feminist thought with narrative theory. The second presenter highlights the affordances and possibilities of reflexive storytelling as an Asian American feminist research method, through methodological insights from a narrative study with young Asian American women exploring how they have been moved to address the conditions of inequity that shape their worlds. The third presenter discusses the utilization of storybook-based narrative interviews with Black mothers of high school students transferred to alternative schools, using Black feminist thought to spotlight how Black mothers experience and exercise agency within carceral systems. While their contexts and orientations differ, our research approaches share a grounding in relational process aligned with and informed by social work practice. How we engage feminist narrative approaches in the research process is a part of our social work praxis and the meaningful impacts we hope to make through our scholarship.