Decolonizing Social Work Education: Transnational Perspectives from Nepal, South Korea, and Taiwan

Social work as a profession carries colonial legacies that have traveled across borders, often displacing Indigenous and locally grounded helping practices in favor of Western, professionalized frameworks. This roundtable will bring together international doctoral students from Nepal, South Korea, and Taiwan — each holding MSW degrees from their home countries — to examine what "social work" means within their distinct national contexts and what decolonization might look like beyond a Western frame. Rather than treating decolonization as a unified project, this conversation will center the irreducible particularity of each context, asking: how have colonial knowledge systems shaped social work education in each country, and what local epistemologies, practices, and histories offer alternative foundations? Attendees will be invited into a comparative, dialogic conversation that refuses easy universalism and takes seriously the uneven geographies of the profession.

Our first presenter will discuss the context in Nepal, where social work exists in tension between long-standing traditions of mutual aid and the growing institutionalization of the profession — often conflated with charity, volunteerism, and NGO work while formal recognition remains weak. Although Nepal was never formally colonized, social work education and practice are increasingly shaped by donor agendas, Western frameworks, English-language dominance, and the pressures of migration and urbanization. This presenter will ask whose knowledge counts, critically examine imported models, and envision training that responds to caste, gender, regional inequality, and the realities of a rapidly changing society.

Our second presenter will discuss the Korean context, where social work education was shaped by successive external forces — Christian missionaries, Japanese colonial structures, and post-war U.S. aid — each leaving behind frameworks that persisted long after their origins were forgotten. Today, nationally standardized curricula transmit Western theories as universal foundations before any Korean thinkers. This presenter will argue that locally rooted knowledge — from indigenous mutual aid traditions such as dure and pumasi to the practice wisdom generated across 483 nationwide neighborhood welfare centers — remains outside what the curriculum recognizes as legitimate theory, even as it sustains Korean communities daily.

Our final presenter will discuss the context in Taiwan, where social work was historically shaped by Western religious groups and industrial-model methodologies, later formalized through state-led initiatives and the 1990 legislative reform that solidified the profession's institutional presence. Yet this growth relied heavily on the vertical diffusion of Western concepts within academia, and recent high-profile child abuse cases have exposed a profound disconnect between imported theoretical frameworks and local practice realities. This presenter will call for a shift away from Eurocentric ideals toward localized pedagogy that directly addresses the systemic stigma and high turnover facing Taiwanese practitioners today.

Together, these three perspectives will illuminate how colonial legacies operate differently across contexts while converging on a shared urgency: the need to reclaim local knowledge, practice wisdom, and community-rooted epistemologies as legitimate foundations for social work education. Our goal is to stimulate conversation on what decolonization means for social work knowledge and education based on the perspectives and positionalities that each presenter brings.