What's Past Is Prologue: Reckoning with Social Work's Complex History to Reimagine Its Future in a Precarious Present

"The past is written, but the future is yours to wield." Echoing the spirit of Shakespeare's The Tempest, this roundtable discussion is facilitated by four doctoral students, each of whose scholarship engages in critical historical inquiry to examine how social work's longstanding entanglements with systems of domination, surveillance, regulation, economic exploitation, and institutional control have shaped the structural conditions of the present and can help to inform our pursuit of a more liberatory future. Drawing on abolitionist, decolonial, critical race, and Black feminist frameworks, we approach social work history not as an objective record, but as a contested terrain shaped by epistemic violence, institutional harm, and persistent resistance. Social work has long operated at the nexus of care and control, functioning simultaneously as an instrument of collective care and a mechanism of state-sanctioned discipline, particularly in the lives of racialized, colonized, and working-class communities. Through a praxis of critical historical inquiry, we encourage our fellow scholars to join us in asking: what patterns of harm and resistance emerge in the profession's past, and how might they inform the work of dismantling oppressive structures, reclaiming erased traditions, and reimagining the profession's future amid renewed forms of state violence, institutional retrenchment, and racialized control?

This session draws together emerging scholars using archival analysis, oral history, critical historiography, legal frameworks, and interdisciplinary approaches to examine how social work's historical alignment with state systems has shaped, and continues to shape, practice, education, and policy. It explores how historical methods can not only expose complicity and harm but also illuminate ethical frameworks for transformation, particularly in moments of authoritarian resurgence and policy retrenchment. One presenter analyzes the racialized and classed history of unpaid internships as a mechanism of structural exclusion within social work education, tracing how economic exploitation became enshrined in accreditation standards and entrenched into the status quo of the profession and speaks to how contemporary resistance efforts echo earlier labor struggles. A second presenter examines how rural social structures have evolved over time, using historical analysis to understand how contemporary social, political, and economic dynamics in rural communities reflect both systemic harm and generative possibilities. A third presenter draws from community-based archives in western Michigan to uncover how the history of segregation and racialized logics of inclusion and exclusion continue to shape contemporary refugee resettlement policy and institutional responses to social inclusion of newcomers. A fourth presenter engages oral history and archival research as liberatory methodologies that challenge institutional erasure and advance abolitionist approaches to policy transformation.

Together, these contributions demonstrate how critical historical inquiry, grounded in abolitionist, decolonial, critical feminist, and critical race perspectives, can help reorient the field toward an ethical alignment between social work science, policy, and practice. This roundtable centers historical scholarship as a liberatory method of knowledge production, creating space for dialogue grounded in historical reckoning, epistemic justice, and the reclamation of subjugated knowledge traditions. In doing so, it supports a future of social work rooted not in compliance, but in collective care, structural resistance, and transformative repair.