Edith Abbott (1876–1957) was a social worker and educator. She was Dean of the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago from 1924 to 1942 and she helped in drafting the Social Security Act of 1935.
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Abbott, Edith
Jean K. Quam
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Abbott, Grace
Jean K. Quam
Grace Abbott (1878–1939) was a teacher who went on to become Director of the Immigrants Protective League of Chicago and Director of the U.S. Children's Bureau. In 1934 she became professor of public welfare at the University of Chicago.
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Abernathy, Ralph David
Lou M. Beasley
Ralph David Abernathy (1926–1990) was a pastor who became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was director of personnel, dean of men, and professor of social studies at Alabama State University.
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Abolitionist Social Work
Noor Toraif and Justin C. Mueller
Abolitionist social work is a theoretical framework and political project within the field of social work and an extension of the project of carceral abolitionism more broadly. Abolitionists seek to abolish punishment, prisons, police, and other carceral systems because they view these as being inherently destructive systems. Abolitionists argue that these carceral systems cause physiological, cognitive, economic, and political harms for incarcerated people, their families, and their communities; reinforce White supremacy; disproportionately burden the poor and marginalized; and fail to produce justice and healing after social harms have occurred. In their place, abolitionists want to create material conditions, institutions, and forms of community that facilitate emancipation and human flourishing and consequently render prisons, police, and other carceral systems obsolete. Abolitionist social workers advance this project in multiple ways, including critiquing the ways that social work and social workers are complicit in supporting or reinforcing carceral systems, challenging the expansion of carceral systems and carceral logics into social service domains, dismantling punitive and carceral institutions and methods of responding to social harms, implementing nonpunitive and noncarceral institutions and methods of responding to social harms, and strengthening the ability of communities to design and implement their own responses to social conflict and harm in the place of carceral institutions. As a theoretical framework, abolitionist social work draws from and extends the work of other critical frameworks and discourses, including anticarceral social work, feminist social work, dis/ability critical race studies, and transformative justice.
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Abolition of Involuntary Mental Health Services
Brianna Suslovic
Apart from a few dissenting perspectives, social workers have not coherently engaged with the moral dilemmas inherent in the profession’s participation in coercing or mandating patients to mental health treatment. With roots in the development of asylums in 1400s Western Europe, involuntary mental health services continue to rely on processes involving the state in order to detain individuals who are deemed severely mentally ill. Legal precedent and practices in the United States as they pertain to involuntary mental health treatment reflect tensions about promoting individual freedom while maintaining safety. Given the diversity of circumstances that social workers may navigate in this particular area of practice, the profession’s ethical commitments to self-determination are potentially in conflict with practices of involuntarily hospitalizing or providing mental health services to individuals. In fact, international health and human rights bodies have weighed in on the role of coercion in mental health treatment, advocating for decreased use of coercive means of confining and treating patients with severe mental illness. Critical perspectives on involuntary mental health services are often rooted in the critiques of psychiatric consumer/survivor/ex-patient organizers, who argue that detaining patients against their will and mandating them to participate in treatment or take medication is a form of violence that violates their rights. There are also some promising approaches to severe mental illness that promote self-determination and attempt to reduce the likelihood of involuntary or coerced treatment, reorienting toward the value of peer support and denouncing the use of nonconsensual active rescue in crisis hotline work. Abolitionists also advocate for the elimination of involuntary mental health services, advocating instead for the development of non-coercive forms of crisis response and care that rely on alternatives to the police.
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Abortion
D. Lynn Jackson
Until the 19th century, abortion law in the United States was nonexistent, and abortion was not seen as a moral issue. However, by the turn of the 20th century, abortion was legally defined and controlled in most of the United States. The landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade (1973) marked the legalization of abortion but did not end the controversy that existed. Legislation at both the federal and state levels between 1989 and 2022, added restrictions on abortion, making it difficult for women to exercise their reproductive rights. In June 2022, the Supreme Court, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), overturned Roe v. Wade (1973), which had guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. Social work’s commitment to promoting the human rights of women compels social workers to be aware of and involved in this issue.
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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Claudia J. Dewane
Clinical social work is a derivative profession, drawing its knowledge and practice base from several theoretical schools. The four primary theoretical schools contributing to social-work philosophy are psychodynamic, humanist, cognitive–behavioral, and postmodern. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), although considered one of the third-wave behavioral approaches, draws from all four theoretical schools of clinical intervention. This entry gives an overview of ACT development, its essential features, empirical base, tenets and techniques, and relevance to the social-work profession.
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Accommodating Students with Physical Disabilities in Higher Education
Anna Escamilla
Students with disabilities are becoming more and more common in higher education classrooms, including social work classrooms. The challenges that come with accommodating students so as to allow equal access to the educational experience are surmountable with the assistance of student disability offices. New technology is being developed to assist students with learning both in and out of the classroom. Supportive attitudes from faculty in including students with disabilities allow all students to benefit from the experience. As compliance with laws such as the ADA becomes commonplace for new construction, the concept of universal design makes inclusion a norm.
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Action Research
David P. Moxley
Through cycles of systematic and purposeful iterative engagement with problems they face in specific practice settings, social workers engaging in action research build knowledge that is useful in advancing practice for the purposes of social betterment. This entry situates action research in the development of social-work knowledge and then examines variants of action research formed when degrees of participation and control vary among members of vulnerable populations, particularly within community situations involving coping with a degraded quality of life. The author identifies the importance of methodological pluralism and addresses how sound action research results in knowledge dissemination and utilization for the purposes of social betterment, often through alternative methods of inquiry. The entry concludes with caveats social workers engaged in action research should heed, and the author emphasizes the pivotal role social work can serve in local efforts to engage in knowledge development for social betterment.
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Adams, Frankie Victoria
Lou M. Beasley
Frankie Victoria Adams (1902–1979) was a social worker who influenced the development of social work education and of professional social work in the American South. She developed the Group Work and Community Organization concentrations at Atlanta University.
