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Beyond the "Diversity Die": Harambee, Africana Womanism, and the Ethical Imperative of Decolonizing Social Work/Mental Health Practice

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Short Description

Traditional clinical social work practice frameworks remain rooted in modernist ethics--Western deontology and utilitarianism--and biomedical models of mental health care. As such, they frequently fail to address the structural and epistemic violence faced by marginalized global and local communities. Practitioners often struggle to determine which dimensions of a client's identity to prioritize, or how to resist frameworks that fragment wholeness into manageable diagnostic categories. This session challenges the "Diversity Die" metaphor, which treats identity as a random roll of the dice: a flattening of complex lived experience into a superficial numbers game where representational inclusion replaces the demand for structural justice. In its place, this keynote proposes a radical redistribution of ethical authority through decolonial praxis. Drawing on Africana, Indigenous, and Latino knowledge systems--including the Harambee methodology, Ubuntu philosophy, the Africana Womanist paradigm, Two-Eyed Seeing, and familismo as relational ethic- this session introduces Identity-Conscious Practice as a justice-oriented framework for "delinking" from colonial dependence. This session provides a roadmap for practitioners to question their "cultural competence" by inviting a transformative, indigenous-informed ethics of collective responsibility and epistemic freedom in clinical practice, education, and supervision.

Learning Objectives

• Deconstruct Western-centric ethical frameworks to expose their structural and epistemic limitations in addressing global inequities, analyzing how colonial epistemologies continue to shape social work practice, policy, and pedagogy.
• Analyze Harambee and Africana Womanism as indigenous, justice-oriented methodologies for decolonizing clinical and community-based social work, evaluating how these frameworks redistribute ethical authority and disrupt Western-centric epistemic dominance.
• Synthesize the Identity-Conscious framework with Harambee and Africana Womanist methodologies to navigate power-sharing, repair relational ruptures, and uphold epistemic justice across diverse practice settings.

Each topic can be adapted to your audience, timeframe, and delivery format, with a minimum of 1 hour of instruction. The summary on this page is intentionally brief; detailed descriptions, learning objectives, and sample agendas are available upon request.

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