If Social Work Were a Person: An Arts-Based Exploration of Social Work Identity Development in the Deep South

As a collective of feminist social workers, 5 current MSW students and 1 Assistant Professor of social work, we merge reflexive group dialogue, what we refer to as “circle discussions”, and arts-based research to explore the following questions: What has contributed or hindered the development of our social work identity? What does it mean to be learning and practicing social work in the American Deep South during a time of systemic upheaval? Our exploration was grounded in the Southern folk art traditions of collage and quilting. By centering the voices of MSW students and centering the Deep South as a “epistemic resource”, we constructed an “analytic quilt” that included patterns of the Deep South as a heuristic, social work as “showing up”, and relationships as the essence of social work practice. The patterns of our quilt uniquely contribute to feminist social work literature on place, social work identity development, and arts-based research.