Covert forms of resistance: Reimagining feminist social work praxis in an increasingly neoliberal world

Social work as a profession has long claimed its roots in and orientations towards social justice. The realities of enacting social justice as a social worker, however, have proven to be more complex than what is typically taught in social work education programs. Neoliberal ideology has so pervasively impacted social work praxis that many burgeoning social workers often face disillusionment, discouragement, and discomfort when settling into the profession. While social workers enter the field emboldened to create meaningful social change, they encounter barriers characteristic of neoliberalism such as managerialism, professionalization, and bureaucracy. As doctoral social work students who have learned, practiced, and taught social work, we have experienced this phenomenon firsthand. In this article, we reflect upon and work to make sense of these experiences, which we frame as a “cruel optimism” of social work, or the “condition of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy” (Berlant, 2011, p. 24). Through engaging in a critically reflexive conversational methodology, we consider the breakdown between the social justice theory that students are often taught and the realities of practice that social workers face in the field, as illustrated by three vignettes. This is rooted in particular analysis of feminist social work praxis, of which all the authors subscribe. We then reimagine new ways to practice feminist social work in the neoliberal landscape, including specific recommendations for how to engage in covert forms of resistance as we collectively repoliticize social work praxis.