Summary
Ethical responsibility for professional social workers to engage in self-care has been enshrined in social work codes of ethics. Ongoing maintenance of self-care is considered the responsibility of individual social workers, with little consideration of how workplaces support or inhibit the practice of self-care.\ Radical self-care includes the consideration of the dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression.\ We explore how the climate and culture of the university workplace has been altered by the pandemic response in ways that are traumatizing to faculty and staff across the university. We critically reflect on the challenges of our current working conditions that thwart the ethical practice of self-care to mitigate the effects of trauma. We reconsider professional values and ethical responsibilities as social work educators in the context of the expanded corporatization of the university. In the post-pandemic era, unprecedented budget cuts, merging and restructuring of departments, reductions in the workforce, elimination of positions and programs, increases in workloads, and erosion of institutional support for faculty have become the norm. Taken together, more attention is needed within social work education to support faculty in neoliberal workplace environments that may not be trauma informed, culturally responsive, or supportive of individuals and communities of self-care. We contend that when market-based "ethics" are privileged over professional ethics, the capacity for caring is undermined. Tension exists between the individual self-care imperative and the ethical duty to challenge discrimination and institutional oppression. We offer a framework for social work departments seeking to become more trauma informed and culturally responsive, and recommendations for promoting an organizational culture of self and collective care.
Keywords (separate with commas)
pandemic, trauma-informed, culturally responsive, ethics, social work education, self-care\