Chaitali Das

Empowerment is a central yet contested concept in social work. This is particularly true in high-control and surveillance contexts, such as social work with refugees. This article critically examines empowerment in social work practice with refugee women in Germany—a setting characterized by complex, bureaucratic asylum systems. Findings show that social workers mediate empowerment through their direct work with individuals aimed at providing basic needs and fostering self-efficacy through strengths-based relationship work. They also support group work and connect individuals to communities. Furthermore, social workers bridge gaps and enable access to services by translating clients’ needs into bureaucratic and legal language and seeking creative solutions within existing systems. Social workers also play a role in influencing bureaucratic processes and expanding the scope of possibilities. Findings highlight how social workers mediate empowerment through interventions that reduce barriers and address powerlessness at the individual, cultural, and structural levels. However, the extent to which these roles can be considered empowering remains contestable. The findings have implications for social work practice, policy, and education, emphasizing that, while ‘mediated intervention’ may offer a useful framework for extremely vulnerable and controlled groups such as refugee women, empowerment must be considered through a critical practice lens.

This article considers issues of coloniality in social work education in Germany. As Quijano (2000) and Mignolo (2009) have identified, even though we are largely in a post-colonial context, ideas of coloniality are deeply embedded in everyday structures, institutions, and practices throughout the globe. Coloniality ensures that particular structures of power remain stable. We examine these power structures in the context of social work education in our university in Germany to exemplify and highlight some of the issues of power and inequalities that exist in the German context. We examine two social work programs at our university and use two examples to illustrate the inclusionary and exclusionary systems in place that maintain coloniality. The first example highlights how innovative educational programs and processes often end up excluding or limiting access for students from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds. The second example highlights how the calls for widening participation in existing programs fail to open possibilities for ‘non-traditional’ students. We argue that addressing coloniality embedded in capitalistic, neo-liberal systems requires deconstructing ‘normality’ in systems, thereby identifying and disrupting paradoxes that limit widening participation and inclusion.

The paper brings to the fore some very central and critical points about Global Citizenship and Cosmopolitanism and the attempts to integrate them in education to create more open-minded citizenry. The history of the development of these concepts as...

Student exposure to international contexts can support students to develop a variety of knowledge, values and skills for social work practice in a globalised world. While various models of internationalisation in social work education exist, semester abroad models have received scant attention in international social work. This article presents perceived learning outcomes for German social work students who participated in an integrated semester abroad programme within the European Union, that are comparable to other international pedagogies. The model showcases reciprocal study abroad arrangements between universities located in neighbouring countries that has implications for such internationalisation beyond exchanges between North-South countries.