Fordham GSS Professor Tina Maschi, Ph.D., and Associate Professor Sandra Turner, Ph.D., recently collaborated on a book chapter exploring the role of feminist and empowerment theories in empowering professionals.
The chapter, titled “Feminist and Empowerment Theory and Practice: A Powerful Alliance,” appears in Rethinking Feminist Theories for Social Work Practice.
Additional GSS Community co-authors on the chapter are GSS doctoral graduate Dr. Smita Ekka Dewan, GSS ’09; MSW graduate Adriana Kaye; and current doctoral student Annette M. Hintenach.
Read the chapter’s abstract below:
This chapter explores the role of feminist and empowerment theories in empowering professionals, such as the female-dominated social justice profession of social work and the vulnerable populations and organizational and community environments that they serve, such as older women with serious offence histories in prison. The central guiding conceptual models of social work practice, a human rights, social, economic, and environmental justice and person-in-environment perspective, are integrated with feminist and empowerment theories. This builds on dialogue and policy reform about different social justice issues and the critical function of leveraging the “power” of social work also driven by various social movements that challenge its conventional functions.
