The mission of social work is to promote human rights, social justice and social change. One of the currents of social work, transnational feminist social work analyses complex oppression based on racism, hierarchical nationalism, class exploitation and sexist control of women in different times and locations in the era of globalization. The paper aims to reflect on inspiration that transnational feminism can offer to transnational feminist social work and possible ways of social work in the era of globalization. Transnational Feminist Social Work originated as a response to globalization; theoretically it builds on transnational social work and transnational feminism. Therefore, the author firstly introduces a new transnational definition of social work, which responds to the global situation. Then she pays attention to the inspiration that transnational feminism brings to transnational feminist social work. In conclusion, she focuses on how to implement transnational feminist social work at the macro, meso- and micro-levels.
The article offers a reflection on the utility of postcolonial studies and transnational feminism for the analysis of women’s post-socialist experiences, with a special emphasis on Croatian academic and social space. After general considerations about the epistemological profile and etico-political agenda of transnational feminism – as illustrated by the results of the feminist seminar in Dubrovnik (2007–2015) – the author presents three theoretically most challenging feminist authors: Madina Tlostanova, Biljana Kašić and Marina Gržinić. Each of them in its own way demonstrates that theoretical voices from the “global South” are the most productive tool to oppose academic “global feminism” and to inspire “women’s struggles for sociopolitical justice, especially in colonial and neocolonial contexts” (Swarr, Nagar 2010: 4). The radical call for the decolonization of gender, human being and knowledge (Tlostanova 2013), the appreciation of woman’s public voices and counter-discourses (Kašić), and the critique of racialization in the production of knowledge (Gržinić 2015) are intertwined and linked to the final thesis about the importance of distinguishing the biopolitical form of women’s memory vs. the necropolitical formation of institutionalized history in post-socialist context.
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