Tina E. Wilson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of British Columbia. She works on the history and philosophy of social work and social welfare, studying professional codes of ethics, textbooks and curricula, and the historical record of the profession’s development in settler Canada. Her work asks how social work’s concepts of justice and progress are formed, held in place, and lose their hold.

Wilson treats social work as an instructive case of how justice claims become institutionalized in universities and welfare systems, a process that shaped what the profession inherited under earlier conditions and continues to shape scholarship produced under present ones. She is equally concerned with the conditions justice claims depend on, since those conditions determine which claims are available and why claims formed under one arrangement lose their grip when the arrangement changes.

Her research is Canadian in its materials and international in its conversations. She held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at Glasgow Caledonian University and continues to work with European colleagues, including comparative research on Canada and Scotland.

Before entering academia, she spent about fourteen years in community practice and research across homelessness services, anti-violence work, and youth work. That experience continues to inform her interest in the relationship between everyday life and institutional arrangements.

Wilson teaches across the BSW, MSW and PhD programs, with a focus on social theory, social justice, and integrative seminars, and has substantially redesigned two required courses.

Current research. A SSHRC-funded historical study of the natural environment in the development of social work in settler Canada asks what a welfare formation can commit to as the material and environmental arrangements it was built on change. She is also a co-investigator on a SSHRC-funded study of autistic people’s perspectives on departure and wellbeing.

One line of Wilson’s work concerns social work’s relation to the non-human. Comparing Canada and Scotland with colleagues, she has argued that the profession’s treatment of the natural world is a form of methodological anthropocentrism, a limit on what it can perceive rather than a subject it has yet to cover. She co-founded and co-convenes the Social Work and the More-than-human Special Interest Group of the European Social Work Research Association.

A second line examines professional ethics as infrastructure. Her study of eight Canadian codes of ethics between 1940 and 2024 shows ethical commitment being reconfigured at each conjuncture rather than progressively advancing, while the codes narrate that history as continuous, smoothing over the conflicts through which each version was settled. The analysis is contributing to a national process developing a code of ethics for peer support work.

A third line concerns what the discipline transmits as justice: disciplinary scholarship, education and the critical social work canon, and a recent study of Canadian undergraduate textbooks. She has argued that ideas can saturate, losing purchase by wearing out rather than by being shown wrong, and that methods which were novel justice strategies for an earlier generation are now conventional and limited in what they produce. The question running through this work is where social work’s justice commitments are being made and unmade, now that the term is widely held and administratively secured.

A further line concerns disability and autistic experience, where lived experience movements and professional welfare knowledge are reshaping what counts as wellbeing and as expertise.

Editorial work. Wilson co-edits the Social Work Futures book series for Edward Elgar Publishing, is a consulting editor at Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work, and has co-edited special issues for Ethics and Social Welfare, Critical and Radical Social Work, and Social Work & Society.

Supervision. Wilson has co-supervised a completed doctorate and supervised two completed MSW theses, sits on doctoral committees at UBC and elsewhere, and works with research assistants through to co-authorship. She welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in historical, philosophical and theoretical questions in social work. Because her work is grounded in particular theoretical approaches, she encourages prospective students to read some of her published research before making contact.

Wilson, T. E. (2026). An ecology of moral infrastructure: Canadian social work ethics, 1940–2024. International Journal of Social Welfare, 35(4), e70091. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsw.70091

Wilson, T. E., & McDermid, J. (2026). A scoping review of more-than-human ethical issues in English-language social work, 2000–2024. Ethics and Social Welfare, 20(3), 298–316. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2026.2653175

Wilson, T. E. (2025). Identity ramifications. Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture, 6(2), 46–52. https://doi.org/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

Wilson, T. E. (2023). “Passing on” critical social work. In S. A. Webb (Ed.), Routledge handbook of international critical social work: New perspectives and agendas (pp. 51–62). Routledge.

Wilson, T. E., Lynch, H., & Fisch, V. (2023). Raising the “environmental question” in social work in Canada and Scotland. International Social Work, 66(6), 1816–1830. https://doi.org/10.1177/00208728221094415

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 posthuman and new materialist perspectives (pp. 32–45). Routledge.

Wilson, T. E. (2021). Surveying critical and social justice-emphatic academic social work in Canada. Canadian Social Work Review, 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. https://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. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcw114

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

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