Social work at the precipice: navigating the paradox of precarity, proceduralization, and the promise of critical activism

The social work profession stands at a critical juncture, caught between its emancipatory aspirations and its co-optation by neoliberal systems of control. This paper argues that the profession's current crisis is rooted in three intersecting phenomena: the precaritization of the social work workforce, the proceduralization of practice that has displaced relationship-based approaches, and the profession's persistent ambivalence toward rigorous evidence generation. Drawing on feminist disability studies, critical race theory, and social activism scholarship, this paper proposes an integrative framework that reimagines social work as a form of "critical, evidence-informed activism." The framework reconceptualizes social work knowledge as pluralistic and democratized while maintaining commitment to methodological rigor. By mobilizing the conceptual contributions of feminist disability studies, embracing epistemic justice, and reclaiming activism as central to professional identity, social work can navigate its existential challenges and fulfill its transformative potential. This paper contributes to ongoing debates about social work's identity, purpose, and future by offering a synthesizing vision that refuses the false binaries of care versus control, evidence versus values, and reform versus abolition.