The cost of being heard: social work research and the ethics of representation

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The use of ‘lived experience’ is often positioned in social work research as a necessary corrective to the profession’s history of exclusion and erasure of marginalised communities. While intended to centre their voices, these efforts can obscure the complexity of experience or detach it from the systems that produce harm. When experience is treated as something to extract, showcase, or translate into evidence, it risks serving institutional goals more than it advances relational accountability. Social work’s engagement with experience, particularly from racialized and historically excluded groups, can reproduce the hierarchies it claims to challenge by controlling how stories are collected, interpreted, and legitimised, while the burden of disclosure falls on those already navigating systemic violence. This paper applies the concept of extractivism, which critiques colonial and capitalist logics, to clarify how such practices convert vulnerability into institutional value. Extractivism exposes how demands for disclosure and expectations of emotional legibility transform lived experience into raw material for professional legitimacy rather than a site of power-sharing or transformation. Recommendations will be made to guide researchers and educators toward more accountable, relational, and anti-extractive approaches.