Decolonial Social Work as an Emerging Intellectual Field: Mapping Its Epistemic Foundations, Thematic Trajectories, and Paradigmatic Status

Purpose Decolonial social work scholarship has expanded over the past decade, yet the intellectual status of the field remains unclear. Despite publication growth and thematic development, there has been limited attention to the way in which diverse critical traditions have shaped the field’s intellectual development. This study sought to move beyond descriptive mapping to theorize the field’s intellectual character.Method The study examined the field’s intellectual development by analyzing a corpus of 227 English-language journal articles (1969–2026) using an integrated bibliometric research design to reveal the conceptual organization, intellectual foundations, thematic evolution, and epistemic architecture of the literature.Results Decolonial social work emerged as a multidimensional intellectual field in which Indigenous scholarship functioned as an epistemic anchor, shaping multiple areas of decolonial social work thinking, while decolonial and critical race theory, epistemic justice scholarship, and critical and international social work perspectives converged around shared concerns with coloniality, knowledge production, and professional transformation without losing their distinctive intellectual identities.Discussion The study contributes a fresh interpretation of the development and contemporary intellectual character of decolonial social work. Rather than being organized around a single canonical tradition, decolonial social work possessed a coherent yet plural intellectual foundation that drew upon multiple interacting intellectual lineages.