Postcolonial Social Work Practice: International Social Welfare in India

Catalog description

In this course, students examine the global welfare system and its engagement with severely marginalized communities. This six-week course centers around a 700,000-strong sex workers' collaborative based in Sonagachi, Kolkata, India, one of Asia's largest red-light districts. Collaborative engagement with the collective and its grassroots movement is combined with research projects and class discussions (in open classrooms that at times include community members, as well as feminist and queer theory scholars from Indian Universities ) in which students engage with texts on HIV, sex work, feminist postcolonial theory and international social work. The class counts for the Human Rights Certificate, as well as macro, direct practice, and NPL electives. As of this year, this course is also part of a campus-wide group of classes that has been put together by faculty involved in #PoliceFreePenn, that thoughtfully and intentionally foregrounds police state abolition.