Decolonising Writing in Post-Anthropocentric Social Work: English

This text draws on the book project: "The Body Politics of Glocal Social Work. Essays on the Post-Anthropocentric Condition.
A brick wall, corridors, rooms, and offices; rows of books in neatly arranged bookshelves; and the computerised space of words where I write and write again, struggling with the sound of academic dry prose and social problems. When I look out of the window from this early twentieth century building I see the water; U bedbug ti imaginatively listen to the sound of the sea; the ice-break of clashing ice-blocks and ice-slush; the sound of waves. Some of the feminist-, Indigenous-, and post-colonial writers that attended to this dilemma claimed that how they wrote, when transforming writing into embodied genre-transgressive creative prose, writing memories, stories, poems, paved way for social justice at the same time as it marginalised their texts (Anzaldua 1987; hooks 1989; Pärmar & Min-ha 1990; Richardson 2000; Livholts 2019). This paper turns to the question of how writing and textual shaping matters for the creating of critical and creative knowledge and learning in social work research and education. I propose that to de-colonise social work, there is a need to de-discipline practices of writing human and multiple embodiment that transcends the relationship with objects and things, all forms of life, and the natural environment. The paper draws on my work with situated life writing inspired by feminist- postcolonial and Indigenous scholarship that used creative life writing genres such as diaries, letters, poetry, and photography to engage in critical thinking and textual reshaping for social justice. I contextualise the writing in the context of the post-anthropocentric condition of more-than-human entanglements, to write with human, architectural, spheric and earthly embodiments. How can writing with walls or writing with water contribute to decolonising practice in social work research and education?