Our Stories in Context: Social Work Education in a Period of Rapid Legislative Change

The dissonance of being a social work educator in a heightened political climate, one that echoes previous eras of overt oppression, exacerbates traumatic stress. This article offers an autoethnographic account of the trauma responses experienced and observed among social work faculty at a metropolitan university in the Southern United States that recently enacted one of the most restrictive anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) laws in higher education. As with many trauma-focused interventions, telling one’s own story carries healing potential at the individual level. However, composite counterstorytelling holds collective power to weaken oppressive forces, disrupt majoritarian narratives, and challenge the status quo. Drawing from our lived experiences and existing scholarship, we outline implications for social work educators, to mitigate traumatic stress, resist anti-DEI efforts, and act with integrity in the face of repression. If the social work profession is to learn from the harms of its past, it must build solidarity through speaking up and speaking out.