Social work has a professional mandate to promote social justice, says Dexter Voisin, dean of social work at the University of Toronto, but has grappled with duelling identities of social change and social control.

He will discuss the unintended ways the profession has inadvertently perpetuated anti-Black racism and promote a framework to overcome it in a workshop for faculty and staff of the UWindsor School of Social Work on Sept. 23.

Entitled "Honouring Our Common Humanity: Addressing Anti-Black Racism in Social Work," Dr. Voisin’s workshop will:

• Illustrate the inherent limitations of adopting a non-racist approach to social work;
• Explore what it means to adopt an anti-Black racism framework;
• Discuss how to incorporate an anti-Black racism framework in admissions, curriculum design, teaching, and research; and
• Provide an interactive opportunity to answer participants’ questions in a supportive approach from the perspective that we are all lifelong learners.

Voisin has more than 145 peer-reviewed publications. A central focus of his scholarship is examining the impact of structural, neighborhood, and police violence on the life chances and behavioral trajectories of urban youth and the protective factors that protect youth in the presence of such adversities.

His latest project is a book entitled America the Beautiful and Violent: Black Youth and Neighborhood Trauma in Chicago, published by Columbia University Press in August 2019.