Social Workers Confronting Racial Injustice Conference

Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work
Imani: ID: A black woman with long, dark haired locs wearing a full length blue dress with printed flowers and birds paired with grey sneakers and a knee length black coat. Imani is posing outside on a sidewalk in front of various trees and bushes; Leah: ID: A 40ish mixed race Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician nonbinary femme with curly brown silver and purple hair, lying on a couch looking at the viewer horizontally. They have rose gold aviator frames, thick eyebrows, red lipstick and sand colored skin, and are looking at the viewer with a kind of tired but hopefully crip wonder. They wear a blue denim vest with a pin that says Neurodivergent Universe above a pink and blue image of a ringed planet, and a black tank top with yellow lettering that read Talk To Plants, Not Cops is barely visible. They have a tattoo of the words "We begin by listening" in magenta cursive script on their left arm.; Sami: D: A black woman smiling proudly at the camera with short, curly dark hair and red lipstick, wearing dark rimmed glasses, sparkly rainbow dangle earrings, and a yellow V-neck top.

2023: Centering Disability Justice

2022: Radical Hope in a Racialized Society

Michelle Alexander seated at 2019 conferece

2021: Are You Ready to Answer the Call?

January 27 and February 3, 2023
12-3:30pm

The 2023 theme for the Social Workers Confronting Racial Injustice Conference is Centering Disability Justice. Our January 27 opening keynote will be a discussion between Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of The Future is Disabled, and Dr. Sami Schalk, author of Black Disability Politics. On February 3, Imani Barbarin, the creator of Crutches and Spice, will close our conference. On both days, breakout sessions will take on issues of disability and racial justice to provide tools, frameworks, and inspiration to change social work practice. The conference is intended to support social workers by challenging and changing our approaches and by rooting our action in radical conceptions of justice. Through our learning together, we hope that this conference will challenge and inspire us all to change our work, our organizations, and our society.

2023 breakout sessions will include local and national issues on a range of topics including: disability pride work, BIPOC family leadership in disability justice work, disability justice in institutional spaces, decolonizing non-profits, key federal disability and racial justice policy proposals, disability and the right to vote, and many others. 

The conference is free to attend. As in the past, we will offer CEUs/CEHs. For keynote sessions, there will be American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters and captioning/CART services. There will also be captioning/CART services for all breakout sessions. 

The conference website will be updated with details on breakout sessions as they come in. Recordings of conference sessions from 2021 and 2022 are available on the conference website and on YouTube.