Tina E. Wilson is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work. Broadly, she works within the history and philosophy of social work and social welfare, exploring how scientific and social movement knowledge interrelate and influence understandings of wellbeing, progress, and social justice.

Before entering the academy, Tina worked for about 15 years in direct practice in Toronto, Canada, primarily as frontline staff in the homeless shelter system, in staff training and program evaluation, and in various forms of worker, network and social movement organizing.

Tina foregrounds questions of discipline and generational standpoint in applied, professional social work, studying how these emerge and are stabilized in relation to welfare, university, and professional infrastructures, and identifying major challenges ahead for the social justice mandate of the profession.

Her current research engages the radical challenge of changing environments to the established scope of human-centric social work and social welfare systems. This involves several projects, including a historiography of settler Canadian social work examining the influence of the natural environment on the early development of the profession.

With colleagues, Tina also works on critical disability and peer support research projects, and co-convenes the Social Work and the More-than-human Special Interest Group, affiliated with the European Social Work Research Association.

Supervision

Tina is interested in supervising students working on philosophically and historically grounded projects related to foundational questions about social work and social welfare.

Wilson, T. E. (2025). Identity ramifications. Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture. 6(2), 46- 52. DOI: 10.9707/2833-1508.1213

Wilson, T. E. (2025). The politics of the textbook, revisited. British Journal of Social Work. 55(3), 1374-1395, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcae199

Lynch H. & Wilson, T. E. (2023). Canonical critiques and geopolitical shifts: Revisiting the oppressive neoliberalism/authentic community dichotomy in social work. Social Work & Society, 21(1), 1-15. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hbz:464-sws-2936

Lynch H. & Wilson, T. E. (2023). Special issue editorial: Social work futures—what social work does the world need now? Social Work & Society, 21(1), 1-13. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hbz:464-sws-2915

Wilson, T. E. & Joseph, A. J. (2023). Special issue editorial: Critical temporalities in social work after “the end of history.” Critical and Radical Social Work, 11(3), 327-331. https://doi.org/10.1332/20498608Y2023D000000005

Wilson, T.E., Lynch, H., & Fisch, V. (2022). Raising the “environmental question” in social work in Canada and Scotland. International Social Work. https://doi.org/10.1177/00208728221094415

Wilson, T.E. (2022). “Passing on” critical social work. In S. A. Webb (Ed.), Routledge handbook of international critical social work: New perspectives and agendas. Routledge (in press).

Wilson, T.E. (2021). An invitation into the trouble with humanism for social work. In V. Bozalek & B. Pease (Eds.), Post-anthropocentric social work: Critical posthumanism and new materialist perspectives (pp. 32-45). Routledge Advances in Social Work.

Wilson T.E. (2021). Surveying critical and social justice-emphatic academic social work in Canada. Canadian Social Work Review / Revue canadienne de service social, 38(1), 25-45. https://doi.org/10.7202/1078388ar

Wilson, T.E. (2020). Social work stories: Situated views and larger visions in disciplinary scholarship and education. Social Work Education: The International Journal, 39(5), 572-583. http://doi.org/ 10.1080/02615479.2019.1703930

Wilson, T.E. (2017). Repairing what’s left in social work, or, when knowledge no longer cuts. British Journal of Social Work, 47(5), 1310-1325. http://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcw114

Areas of Scholarship: History and philosophy of social work, critical social theory, equity and social justice, nature-environment, disability

Areas of Practice: Homelessness, youth work, anti-violence work, community work