Disrupting white epistemologies : de-binarising social work

Social work was born white. As a child of Western Modernity, the profession emerged from social conditions and cultural frameworks of that place and time and has been applied in the non-Anglophone worlds without critical regard to its cultural origins. This chapter considers one of the most foundational epistemological principles to emerge from Modernity and how it has gone to shape even social work: the binary. This version of the binary has defined the worlds within which it was born, as a world divided in half, and as incommensurable oppositions; it has shaped social work as well. Without a critical understanding of the intrinsically divided nature of this binary, we will continue the epistemic violences that are made possible by it; a principle that established the idea and reality of the Other.