An Introduction to the Special Issue: Anti-Oppressive Group Work

Abstract

The field of counselor education has long had a history of being a vanguard in commitments to multiculturalism and social justice, with scholars having named multiculturalism and social justice as the fourth and fifth forces in counseling. These movements have also found their way into group work, with scholars and leaders in the field recognizing the importance of both in the application of group work. These commitments have continually been institutionalized in professional practice statements made by organizations including the Association for Specialists in Group Work (ASGW; McCarthy et al., 2022; Singh et al., 2012). Through the COVID-19 pandemic, racial reckoning that resurfaced with the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, among countless others (see Wu et al., 2023), and the increasing number of legislations targeting the Queer, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities, scholars began to increasingly question whether multiculturalism and social justice are sufficient. Accordingly, there has been an increased uptake in scholarly and clinical actions to address the longstanding and evolving oppressive forces, structures, and systems that influence the processes and practices of counseling, including group work. An such, the impetus for the current special issue emerged from the recent development of the ten Principles of Anti-Oppression, wherein Peters and Luke (2022) engaged in a poststructural, qualitative Critical Analytic Syntheses research to empirically identify and define principles of anti-oppression, which they define as a “framework and practice to guide the current and future critical and liberatory movement within counseling” (p. 4). Peters and Luke (2022) have contended that these Principles of Anti-Oppression were relevant to the field of counselor education with applications for teaching, supervision, and research. As they noted, these principles offer “viable points of entry to the processes and practices available to address the complex, intersectional, and multifaceted nature and forces, structures, and systems of oppression and discrimination (e.g., racism, genderism, ableism, heterosexism, classism, nationalism)” (Peters & Luke, 2023, p. 3). In discussions with these authors, we noted how logical and relevant it would be to apply the 10 principles to group work, recognizing that groups are a microcosm of society (Guth et al., 2019; Ward, 2011) and subject to similar patterns of intra-, inter, and systemic oppression experienced elsewhere. Relatedly, we recognized that group work can intentionally, or unintentionally, reproduce and reify larger societal, cultural, and social system dynamics and functioning (McCarthy et al., 2021; Peters & Luke, 2022). This, alongside the longstanding commitment of the ASGW, and by extension, its journal, The Journal for Specialists in Group Work (JSGW)’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, the inclusion of a special issue centered around anti-oppression felt like a very strong fit that could fill an important gap in the literature. As such, we