Introduction — Anna Scheyett
SOCIAL JUSTICE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK: AN INTRODUCTION Anna Scheyett, PhD, Dean and Professor
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core commitment at the University of Georgia School Of Social Work is to promote social justice and oppose injustice in all its forms. Our roots in social justice work go deep. Founded in the 1960s during the civil rights movement, our commitment to social justice began with the School’s inception and continues to this day. Among our most notable social justice endeavors are the longstanding Foot Soldiers of the Civil Rights project, led by Maurice Daniels, and the establishment of the Center for Social Justice, Human and Civil Rights, led by Lee Cornelius. Over the past four years, the faculty of the School of Social Work have been impelled to action by the strife and injustice in our communities, and particularly by the recent crises of racial violence, pandemic, and economic downturn. We have engaged deeply with the construct of social justice, working together to create a clear vision of what social justice means to us. This reflection and co-construction created great energy and resulted in significant
change. Several notable efforts come to mind. First was the revision of the MSW curriculum, re-grounding our teaching in our social justice mission. The foundation of this curriculum is a course entitled Addressing the Bases of Power, Oppression, Social Justice, Evidence-Informed Practice, Advocacy, and Diversity (affectionately known as PrOSEAD). The description and learning objectives for this course are found later in this document. A second effort was the creation of the Faculty Social Justice Statement. This statement was crafted over many months. It began with an open discussion of social justice, where we raised the question “How can we work for social justice if we don’t have a common understanding from which to build?” This was followed by facilitated card-storming and conceptsorting sessions. Faculty worked in groups to complete the sentence “At the UGA School of Social Work, social justice is…” and sorted the resultant phrases into conceptual categories. Later, each
SOCIAL JUSTICE WANTED | 2020-2021
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