Decolonizing Asian American Social Work Research: Critical Reflections of Filipinx American Settler Colonial Contexts

Background and Purpose: Filipinx Americans (FAs) are the descendants of Peoples impacted by colonization, imperialism, and overseas labor migration, among other political, economic, and social forces. In their diasporic migration, the FA community has relied on itself, often through community mutual aid, in times when social welfare safety nets fall short in providing sufficient care. And, in their diasporic migration, FAs have worked and settled in unceded and occupied Indigenous lands, knowingly or otherwise, complicit in settler colonialism. This paper utilizes a settler colonial analytical framework to examine how social work research on Filipinx Americans, more specifically, and Asian Americans, more generally, can be decolonized in order to better serve the needs of the Filipinx diaspora community in the United States (US) while reducing the harms of settler colonialism.

Methods: This study employs a critical reflection process as research method to examine the historical, sociopolitical, health, and wellbeing contexts of Asian settler colonialism and their implications in social work research and practice based contexts with Filipinx communities. The study begins with a broad overview of the settler colonial contexts of the Philippines and US and then interrogates how settler colonialism should be considered in social work research and practice with FA communities. Authors’ past and current research on Filipinx community and behavioral health are interrogated to identify opportunities and limitations to research and practice, primarily situated between Western-based and Filipinx cultural approaches, by examining the utility of Indigenous, Indigenist, and place-based approaches specific to FA diaspora communities.

Results: This critical analysis reveals that FAs occupy a precarious position, caught between settler colonial projects in their homelands, enacted by Spain, the US, and Japan, and their contemporary roles within settler colonial structures in Turtle Island (the continental US and Canada) and Hawai‘i. The extractionism and impoverishment enacted through these colonizations catalyzed a Filipinx diaspora, a survival strategy aimed at shoring up resource depletion endured since the onset of colonial presence in the archipelago. The US positioned Filipinx within their settler colonial project as cheap labor to supplant enslaved labor of the African diaspora, which was moving towards abolition, and Native labor, which was more difficult to control due to extant intellectual and political sovereignty. Thus, FAs were coopted into the settler colonial system of Indigenous subjection, genocide, and land theft, and unwittingly became settlers and immigrants on Indigenous lands. Through the settler colonialism lens, the study identifies specific strengths, challenges, and strategies to disrupt Asian settler colonialism within contexts of social work research and practice.

Conclusions and Implications: This study concludes that a decolonized approach to social work research and practice methods is instrumental for meeting the needs of the Filipinx diaspora community in the US. This requires reframing immigrant narratives in social work research to acknowledge Asian settler colonialism, requiring a disruption to current approaches to social work research and practice.