Teaching Political Economy for Abolitionist Social Work Praxis: A Formative Evaluation of "Economics for Emancipation (E4), a Course on Capitalism, Solidarity, and How We Get Free"

Background and Purpose: Financial precarity is structurally produced by racial capitalism. Friedline, Wood, and Morrow (2022) argue that social work must treat financial education as political education, targeting systems rather than individuals. Drawing on Freirean popular education and Black feminist scholarship, they call for approaches that cultivate critical consciousness and intervene at the level of systems. This study builds on that framework by examining the relevance of Economics for Emancipation (E4E) for abolitionist social work praxis. E4E is an eight-module curriculum developed by the Center for Popular Economics and the Center for Economic Democracy. Grounded in popular education and movement-based economic analysis, it offers a structural examination of political economy and participatory tools to imagine economies centered on care and liberation. While used with organizers, its applicability to abolitionist social work has not been formally examined.

Methods: Emancipatory Place Lab, an abolitionist praxis collective, conducted a participatory formative evaluation of E4E with eight graduate-level social workers, with participation in the Lab ranging from two to five years. The group met biweekly, followed the curriculum guide, and rotated facilitation. The guiding question was: How does E4E support, challenge, or require adaptation for abolitionist social work praxis? Guided by utilization-focused evaluation (Patton & Campbell-Patton, 2021), the study centers abolition-oriented social workers as intended users. Data were generated through eight recorded and transcribed debrief discussions and structured individual memos, and analyzed using a rapid qualitative approach (Kowalski et al., 2024). The team used structured summaries, analytic matrices, and team-based interpretation to support timely synthesis and identify patterns in learning, participatory processes, and relevance for social work practice.

Results: E4E supports abolitionist social work praxis by making key political economic concepts (e.g., approaches to organizing economies) accessible and strengthening participants’ capacity to engage in analysis of racial capitalism. Content on the solidarity economy supports the ability to conceptualize alternatives. Its popular education approach fostered engagement and deepened connection among participants through dialogue and activities. E4E also challenged participants by revealing that, despite sustained engagement with abolitionist theory and praxis, they had limited prior exposure to foundational political economic concepts, positioning this content as both essential and accessible. Drawing on their experience as abolitionist social workers, participants also identified gaps in the curriculum, particularly the lack of explicit attention to the relationship between the nonprofit industrial complex and the prison industrial complex within racial capitalism, and to how economic inequities are criminalized in ways that shape social work roles.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest that E4E supports abolitionist social work praxis through accessible political economic education and participatory learning, while also challenging praxis by exposing gaps in foundational training. Results informed a set of recommendations for how to integrate content about the nonprofit industrial complex, criminalization, and social work’s role within these systems into E4E for social workers. Strengthening these areas is critical for supporting social workers to more intentionally engage—and transform—their roles toward anti-carceral, harm reduction approaches. The study contributes to scholarship on political economic education as a pathway for advancing abolitionist social work.