Caring, Deciding, Knowing: Radical Social Work at the Crossroads of Ecofeminism and Self-Organization

The contemporary ecological and social crisis cannot be separated from a crisis in the ways power is organized, nor from the ways in which forms of knowledge are hierarchized and recognized as legitimate. Ecofeminism and theories of self-organization - rooted, among others, in the social ecology tradition associated with Murray Bookchin - shed light, each in their own way, on the links between the exploitation of living beings, the devaluation of reproductive labour, the concentration of power, and the erasure of situated forms of knowledge.

This seventh issue seeks to bring these critical traditions into dialogue with the field of radical social work by exploring the overlooked or undertheorized dimensions that these intersections may reveal within professional practices, institutions, and collective forms of organizing care.

The aim is not to unify these approaches, but rather to examine their points of tension: between institutions and the reproduction of life, between decision-making and lived experience, between legitimate forms of knowledge and situated knowledge. Social work, as a concrete space where these tensions are produced and negotiated daily, provides a particularly relevant field for this reflection.

In keeping with the critique of the hierarchy of knowledge that runs throughout this issue (Theme 1), contributions are not restricted to the conventional academic format: research articles, practice narratives, testimonies, and interviews are all welcome and valued equally. The editorial process itself seeks not to reproduce the hierarchy between legitimate theoretical knowledge and marginalized experiential knowledge that this issue specifically seeks to challenge.

We invite theoretical, empirical, and practice-based contributions organized around the following three themes.

Theme 1 -  The Hierarchy of Knowledge as a Political Blind Spot

Knowledge related to care, the reproduction of life, and situated experience has historically been marginalized, depoliticized, or rendered invisible, while institutional, discursive, and expert knowledge has been recognized as the only legitimate basis for decision-making. This division profoundly structures political and professional practices, including within critical and alternative spaces.

This theme invites contributions that explore the following questions: Who speaks and who is heard within social institutions? Who defines intervention priorities? Which forms of knowledge — professional, experiential, popular — are considered “political” and which are relegated to the status of mere “technical” expertise? How do hierarchies of gender, class, and race reinforce these hierarchies of knowledge within social professions themselves? What practices (training, participatory methodologies, collective writing, etc.) make it possible to transform these hierarchies?

Theme 2 - Democracy and Ecofeminism

Theories of self-organization, rooted in the tradition of social ecology, criticize the concentration of political and economic power and seek to rebuild forms of local self-government based on direct democracy. Ecofeminism, for its part, examines the concrete material conditions – care work, food systems and the maintenance of bodies and relationships - without which no collective deliberation can take place.

This theme explores the conditions for a democracy that takes the reproduction of life seriously as a political issue, rather than treating it as its silent background. How can we imagine local democratic institutions that do not separate political decision-making from care work? Which experiments in self-government have attempted to articulate direct democracy and ecofeminism? What tensions emerge when democratic collectives unintentionally reproduce the hierarchies they seek to overcome?

This theme addresses political and institutional forms at a broad level (municipalism, local assemblies, democratic experiments). Theme 3 takes up these questions at the specific level of social work institutions and collectives. The two themes are therefore complementary rather than redundant: one establishes the broader theoretical and political framework, while the other examines it through the lens of a specific professional field.

Theme 3 - Intersections between Ecofeminism, Self-Organization, and Radical Social Work

Social work is a highly feminized professional field, structurally associated with activities of care, social reproduction, and attention to living beings - precisely those activities that ecofeminism has analyzed as historically devalued and naturalized. This observation is not incidental: it places social work at the heart of the questions raised by ecofeminism, while exposing it to the same mechanisms of invisibilization.

However, this feminization is not a natural fact but a social and historical construction, itself rooted in the gendered assignment of care work - the very process that ecofeminism seeks to challenge. The relationship between women and social work must therefore be examined as a social relation with a history, and politicized as such, rather than understood as a supposed natural affinity between “women” and “care.”

The same caution applies to the category of “women” itself: the profession is shaped by relations of class, racialization, and migration status (home care workers, undocumented workers, precarious workers, and internal hierarchies among social professions), which reinforce or transform the devaluation of the sector and cannot be treated as secondary issues.

This theme also seeks to extend the question of self-organization raised in Theme 2 to professional collectives: to what extent can teams, services, and social work collectives themselves become spaces of local self-organization, collective deliberation, and shared decision-making, in the spirit of the forms of self-government envisioned by social ecology — rather than remaining mere executors of institutional decisions made elsewhere?

How does the feminization of social work contribute to the social, symbolic, and economic devaluation of the sector? In what ways do the professional knowledge of social workers — often tacit, relational, and embodied — follow the same patterns of invisibilization as the knowledge of care analyzed by ecofeminism? Which forms of radical social work explicitly or implicitly draws on ecofeminist perspectives or practices of self-organization? How can we imagine social work collectives that bring together recognition of reproductive labour, professional self-organization, and the questioning of knowledge hierarchies, without reproducing the division between those who care and those who decide?

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