Introduction

There is much said about social work's complicity in state violence globally, as in systemic intergenerational trauma resulting from ideologically driven social policy – from stolen babies in Spain and Ireland, to institutional racism inherent from Nazi Germany, to apartheid in South Africa, to First Nations oppression (Garner, 2010; Bhatti-Sinclair, 2011; Bartoli, 2013). With each exposed scandal, there is both justified outcry that a profession purporting to stand for social justice should be involved in such brutal subjugation and a reluctance or push-back to scrutinising social work as a whole. It has caused many to ask if social work, by its very nature, is the apparatus of the state of the day. If social justice statements are comforting fig leaves soothing a profession's moral conscience, it may indeed be that social work can only truly decolonise by untying its tether to power altogether. Or is a binary view of social work as state or anti-state too simplistic? Is abolitionism a spectrum that social work has always been engaged in, giving space for daily micro and macro resistances within the system?

This chapter considers both the labour which has gone into exposing social work's complicity with oppression and the ways in which decolonisation might be achieved. The focus is on social work education as a space for resistance and activism. The specific focus which follows is on the structural design of social work education as perhaps a lesser-explored area of resistance – who enters social work education, who teaches and the constructed classroom. The chapter considers as a case study the march to professionalisation experienced across social work in England and, specifically, the politically conferred power that regulatory bodies with registration machinery have over the agency to resist. Is decolonisation compatible with professionalisation?

We acknowledge the intense labour engaged in decolonisation. Questioning if we have come far enough or if more is achievable does not diminish these efforts. The emotional labour of resistance is acknowledged, and the pushback or strength of the backlash is perhaps a testament to how disorientating the resistance to state power has been.