Tina E. Wilson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of British Columbia. Her research examines how the welfare infrastructures through which societies organize collective life are built, contested, and transformed over time, particularly when they encounter problems they were not designed to address. Working at the intersection of critical social theory, the history and philosophy of social work, and environmental scholarship, she investigates how ideas about justice, wellbeing, and social problems become established, and how changing historical conditions require them to be reimagined.

Across her work, Wilson is interested in the relationship between continuity and change. She examines how professional ethical commitments that appear stable often prove, under historical scrutiny, to have shifted considerably, and how scientific and professional knowledge is reshaped through encounters with the knowledge generated by social movements, communities, and lived experience. Her research develops conceptual frameworks for understanding social work as a profession that mediates changing relationships between care, justice, and collective life during periods of social transformation.

Wilson teaches across the BSW, MSW, and PhD programs, with a focus on social theory, social justice, and integrative seminars. Before entering academia, she spent approximately fifteen years in community practice and research across homelessness services, anti-violence work, and youth work. These experiences continue to inform her interest in the relationship between everyday practice and infrastructural change.

Her current research develops along two interconnected strands. The first examines social work’s encounter with ecological crisis, asking how a profession built around human welfare can respond to challenges that exceed a human-centred framework, and what this means for welfare states under pressure to move beyond growth-based models. Supported by SSHRC funding, this work is developed in ongoing conversation with the Social Work and the More-than-Human Special Interest Group of the European Social Work Research Association, which she co-founded. The second examines disability and neurodivergence as challenges to dominant understandings of wellbeing, care, and social justice. It explores how these categories have been understood across changing historical conditions and what the intensification of disablement under contemporary capitalism reveals about welfare infrastructures and the possibilities for collective change.

She welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in historical, philosophical, and theoretical questions in social work. Because her work is grounded in distinctive theoretical approaches, she encourages prospective students to read some of her published research before making contact.

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. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2026.2653175

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