Jessica Lee

In this article, the authors argue that in the United States, structural racism set the stage that increased persons of color’s vulnerabilities and risks to COVID-19 compared to Whites, while simultaneously killing Blacks through racialized policing. They draw on structural violence as a theoretical framework to ground their argument and add to the discussion on the need for social work to explicitly build structural competency to effectively respond to structural racism. Most importantly, the authors contend that, structural racism entails a network of interdependent institutions and organizations that interact with individuals in a complex way to affect health and well-being. Therefore, eliminating racism needs to move beyond a single institution and organization to interdependent relationships among institutions and the mechanized paths through which their effects are translated at the community and individual levels. In this regard, instead of simplifying the complexities surrounding structural racism, we should embrace them and build knowledge system and tools that are complexity sensitive toward eliminating racism. The authors extend the emerging discussion on a renewed focus for structural competency in social work education and respond to the Grand Challenge to Eliminate Racism by presenting a “structuragram” as a heuristic to assess, analyze, and intervene at the structural level factors that influence the individual and community’s realities. We conclude with a case example and recommendations for structural competency-based practice.

This scoping review identifies and analyses historical to present–day contributions of social work scholarship on forced migration, with the aim of reviewing trends and identifying priority areas for the discipline moving forward. This review examined 331 articles related to forced migration published in 40 social work journals over four decades (1978 to 2019). Findings illustrate notable trends in temporal, methodological, topical and geographical dimensions and how those vary by first authors’ locations, research sites and study populations. Temporally, the number of articles has been increasing, quadrupling between 2001–2010 and 2011–2019, with 20 social work journals doubling their number of articles. Methodologically, the large majority of articles were qualitative and/or conceptual. Topically, the most common were practice, intervention, health and mental health, while the least common topics included human rights, social justice, poverty, religion, violence, history and theory. Geographically, social work scholarship was mainly focused on refugees in the Global North and third-country resettlement contexts, and authored by scholars in the Global North. Findings thus reveal critical gaps in topics and geographical biases, raising questions related to issues of ethics, power and the production of knowledge about forced migration in the social work academy.

Within its 150-year history, public health has grown from a focus on local communities to include countrywide, then international, and now global perspectives. Drawing upon the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, this article provides an overview of global public health within the broadest possible context of the world and all of its peoples. Also provided are the global burden of disease as measured in disability-adjusted life years, global health statistics, current health priorities, and recommendations for action by social workers and other health professionals.