Fariyal Ross-Sheriff

This article draws on informal and formal experiences with Islam and Social Welfare beginning with early childhood, higher education, and on through four decades—1996 through 2016—as a social work professor, including research, teaching, community service, and active participation in the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), and the Society for Social Work Research (SSWR). I present four recommendations to social work professionals: Examine your understanding of your own religion or worldview and other religions, including Islam; acknowledge challenges arising from your own cultural and religious traditions; be cautious about projecting your fears and problems onto Muslims; and use primary sources to understand Islam and Muslims.

When Christine Flynn Saulnier and I started our tenure as the coeditors of Affilia in fall 2006, we declared our intention to build upon the vision of the founding mothers of Affilia within the context of global changes that were occurring during the first decade of the 21st century. That vision was a journal that would provide space for feminists in the academy to examine the serious challenges that women were facing. Women academicians found that they could not get their manuscripts on feminist issues, such as unequal pay, tenure, and promotion; the glass ceiling; and violence against women published in social work journals. The voices of feminist social work practitioners and academicians who examined the challenges that women face in their day-today lives at home and in the workplace and who interpreted their research from feminist perspectives were absent in professional journals. Therefore, the founding mothers developed their vision to encourage scholarship, to enable the publication of articles on social work practice and social welfare from feminist lenses, and to promote theories that helped gain an understanding of and advance women's causes in racial, ethnic, professional, geographic, and sexual orientation matters. Christine and I noted in 2006 that although there had been changes in social work professional and publication networks in the first years of the 21st century, many of the problems that motivated the founders still remained. Thus, we made a commitment to publish articles that would reflect the vision of the founding mothers, including the first group that served on the editorial board of Affilia and the first five editors in chief (see Table 1). We also sought to foster a broader concept of globalization that seemed limited for social work to (1) international social work, (2) comparative analyses of social work practices and social welfare policies among nations, and (3) comparative analyses of women's positions and women's concerns in different nations. The emerging broader concept encompasses challenges that women and feminist practice face, including the impact of globalization on social work, transnational and multilateral social work, translocal networks, the impacts of global changes on women's lives, the need for global regulation, and hybrid forms of practice that combine elements from the private and public sectors and result in opportunities as well as challenges for women. Transnational social work requires investments in research, practice, and analyses of institutional functions, as well as intricate connections of international and local organizations and advocacy at all levels. Transnational social work also calls for an understanding of the challenges facing women who migrate-within their

The Indian movie Mala Aai Vhhaychy (“I Want to Be a Mother” in the Marathi language), in juxtaposition with the article in this issue of Affilia by Rotabi and Bromfield entitled “Intercountry Adoption Declines and New Practices of Global Surrogacy: Global Exploitation and Human Rights Concerns,” bring to the surface several cultural, social, ethical, economic, and professional social work issues that I address in this editorial. The movie asks a challenging question in relation to mothering: Does the poor, rural, Gujarati (Indian) mother, who would benefit financially from surrogacy, have any claim to the child she is bearing for an American fertility-touring couple? More questions are raised with the possibility that the child may be born with a handicap, with the response of the commissioning couple, and additional more positive and negative twists in the story. Rotabi and Bromfield’s article raises the ethical dilemma as well as human rights concerns arising from international surrogacy, using India as a case example. Both the movie and the article focus on gestational surrogacy by Indian women, for predominantly western couples.