The Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service (GSS) congratulates Associate Professor Sameena Azhar, Ph.D., who recently received the 2025 Feminist Manuscript Award from the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE)!
The Feminist Manuscript Award recognizes manuscript authors who draw upon feminist and womanist theory, research methods, and educational practices. The award celebrates Azhar’s work on a book chapter she wrote titled “Applying transnational feminism to international social work: Advocacy via decolonial practices in social work education, research, and practice.”
The chapter will appear in the forthcoming book, The Routledge International Handbook of Global Social Work, set to release on August 25.
Azhar will accept the award at this year’s Annual Program Meeting (APM) conference in October.
The Impact of Transnational Feminism on International Social Work
Azhar’s chapter analyzes how transnational feminism is a critical ideology for international social work. It provides direct applications of transnational feminism to social work research, practice, and education with a particular focus on how social work operates in settler colonial states, like Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States.
“Methods of accomplishing a transnational feminist approach to international social work include decolonizing the social work curriculum, creating global collaborations with schools of social work, developing community-engaged research projects in international contexts, and designing meaningful international social work field placements,” the abstract reads. “These methods can serve as vehicles to decolonize social work to more fully address intersectional marginalization across the globe.”
The Local Relevance of Global Issues
The Routledge International Handbook of Global Social Work is an exploration of “glocal” social work—which the book describes as “the constant interplay between global issues and their local relevance, and between transnational topics and practice and their local application.” It highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity in glocal social work as collective responsibility, weaving together multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder engagement approaches into one cohesive narrative.
The book is divided into four parts:
- Foundations and perspectives
- Local responses to global phenomena
- Preparing social workers for global-local engagement
- Broader issues and future directions
Azhar’s chapter falls under Part III: Preparing Social Workers for Global-Local Engagement. We can’t wait to support her achievement at this year’s APM conference in Denver.
Read more about The Routledge International Handbook of Global Social Work here.
