Mourning, Responsibility, and Social Work

This paper seeks to explore the profound and rupturing impact that grief can have as a method to disrupt and analyze social works epistemological foundations. The paper first explores and identifies social works positivist roots and the limitations this has on creating liberatory and progressive inclusion practices. The essay then seeks to establish and identify the need for emotions within social work scholarship. By exploring this need, the paper hopes to identify different ways that emotions, such as grief, can be used as a tool that collectivizes critical frameworks to create and reimagine new and innovative practices to rethink what social work can be within the Canadian context. Ultimately, the essay is a call for social work to rethink how we use grief in our work and invites productive questions of how it can be used as a tool to bring together critical epistemologies that have been othered within scholarship to create new forms of solidarity within the field moving forward.