Mandate:

The Center for Women Centered Social Work (CWCSW) as the name connotes aspires to continue to create a cadre of feminist and gendered social work professionals who engage actively in the country for engendering society, programmatic interventions, institutions and social work practice processes. Hence the aspiration is to continue this work as well as develop core research and field action areas on violence against women, gender and development practice and promotion of women's economic, social and political rights. CWCSW defines it role to develop higher education in social work which is relevant to the community and society. There are three core areas which the Center works with:

(i) Education - both formal and non-formal education starting from MA in social work to wide range of stakeholders in formal institutions and informal spaces.           

(ii) Developing services for women to access social justice mechanisms, programmes for welfare and empowerment and thereby promoting gender equality and equity

(iii) Strengthening State and Systems' response to Women Issues - addressing both gender specific needs and gender redistributive aspirations.

Teaching Programme: MA (Women Centred Practice) in Social Work, focuses on preparing students to locate women as a central category of analysis to evolve an understanding of their condition, position and status and their relationship with men, resources and power in society. The key areas that they learn and engage with, are the study of social construction of women’s labour, sexuality, fertility and violence; review impact of economic policies on women’s lives, engage with sectoral policies and programs and understand the role of the state and law in defining their position in society. They learn to review and analyse intervention models and learn skills of interventions with feminist approaches. Their repertoire includes skills of interventions in micro, meso and macro contexts, e.g., with individual women, in communities in rural and urban contexts, work with and within state systems, conduct gender and intersectional analysis of development policies, engage with collective mobilisation processes, conduct research, action and advocacy. They learn to use feminist approaches to raise resources and develop small programmatic proposals for interventions

Field Action Projects
1. Special Cell for Women and Children- social work intervention on Violence against Women located in the police system has completed 37 years of its work. The Special Cell continues to closely engage with the police, State and Judiciary. In 2005 the govt of Maharashtra took over the programme and today it has spread to 144 [3 talukas in every districts of Maharashtra].

2. A second FAP Resource Center for Interventions on Violence against Women[RCIVAW] was initiated in 2008 to consolidate and upscale the work on Violence against Women. RCIVAW has been working with State Governments of Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Orissa, Delhi, Rajasthan, Ladakh, Jammu, Kashmir, Meghalaya, Assam towards replication of this initiative and collaborating with other stakeholder to set up services, capacity support, training and research and strengthen state response for Violence against Women. Both field action projects have worked towards developing a niche area for women centred social work practitioners who intervene using feminist and women centred approaches with women survivors of violence.

Field Extension and Engagement
The Centre works with women from Dalit, Adivasi and other marginalised groups using the intersectional discrimination approach as it recognises that ‘women’ is not a homogeneous category, and in all their diverse and specific contexts and locations continue to remain marginalised and have to be studied and addressed as separate groups. This means an understanding of feminist theorisation, praxis models, praxis trajectories in the global and indigenous contexts and developing appropriate skills for analysis and interventions. Research publications and advocacy efforts have been directed towards these fulfilling these aspirations.

The Faculty of the Centre are board  members of several NGOs like Akshara, Mumbai, Humsafar Trust Lucknow, Samvedna, Bhopal, Vikalp Sansthan Rajasthan, SWATI, Gujarat, Eva Foundation, Bihar and National Council for Women Leaders

International Collaborations

A formal MOU was signed with Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences for a four country research project (Malaysia, South Africa, India and Germany) IWAAC-10 (Inequalities Within and Among Countries: Implementing a Research Based Social Work Curriculum on SDG 10). During this project PhD students of Social Work have attended summer schools in Germany, India and Malaysia since 2021 to 2023. This has comprised of both theory and field engagements in these three countries to locate social work interventions and praxis.