Jane McPherson
Associate Professor
Director, Global Engagement
Jane McPherson develops and advocates for human rights-based approaches to social work practice in the U.S. and around the world. She also conducts archival research to document local Georgia histories of charity and social work. Her award-winning project, Complex Cloth (https://complexcloth.org/), details the history of the former cotton mill that now houses UGA Social Work, and explores the mill as a site of exploitive labor practices and as the locus of social work intervention. Currently she is working on a book-length project on Judia Jackson Harris, an Athens-born educator and community organizer who promoted cooperative land ownership among Black farm families in Jim Crow Georgia. Dr. McPherson serves as Advisor to the Social Welfare History Group and is co-chair of the Society for Social Work Research’s History cluster. She is the co-editor of the 2022 book Human Rights in this Age of Uncertainty: Social Work Approaches and Practices from Southeast Europe and is the author of more than 30 peer-reviewed articles related to human rights, history, and social work. As an arts activist, McPherson was Florida’s state organizer for One Million Bones, a nationwide anti-genocide initiative that created and laid one million handmade bones on the National Mall in Washington, DC. A licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), McPherson worked for 20 years in child protection, bereavement, mental health, maternal-child health, infant mental health, and torture treatment before becoming a professor.
Education
- Ph.D., College of Social Work, Florida State University
- MSW, School of Social Work, Columbia University
- MPH, School of Public Health, Columbia University
- BA, Semiotics, Brown University
Research Interests
- Human rights & social work
- Global social work
- Social work history
- Immigrants and refugees
- Maternal-child health
- Social work education
Teaching Specialties
- Human rights & social work
- Global social work
- Social work history
- Social work practice
- Arts activism
Complex Cloth Project
Complex Cloth is Dr. McPherson’s ongoing project documenting the multiple histories related to the University of Georgia School of Social Work, the profession of social work in Athens, and the historic mill building that the School now occupies at 279 Williams Street in Athens, Georgia. To learn more: https://complexcloth.org/
Telling Complicated Stories or Why History Matters for Social Work
This 3-part lecture complicates the stories we tell about the social work profession, while looking locally at the history of Athens, Georgia. In Part 1, McPherson discusses social work’s history of “facilitating injustice” (Yoosun Park’s term) and provides a few examples that reach beyond Georgia. In Part 2, she highlights the stories of pioneering Black social workers and social work institutions in Georgia, whose histories should be shared more widely. In Part 3, she brings us back to Athens, Georgia, where she lives and works, where she delves into the history of the Athens Factory (in whose building the University of Georgia School of Social Work now operates) and then explores links between social work’s beginnings here and a dominant white supremacist ideology.
Slavery at UGA: A Tour of North Campus
Truth telling is a social work intervention. The short film Slavery at UGA: A Tour of North Campus (co-produced by Jane McPherson), is an effort to truthfully narrate some of the University of Georgia’s difficult history. The film illuminates this history and also contributes to discussions of how this history should be remembered, memorialized, and addressed today.
One Million Bones
One Million Bones was a national arts-activism project that laid one million handmade bones on the National Mall in Washington, DC, as a visible petition against ongoing genocide and mass atrocity. Jane McPherson explains the project in this video documenting the installation of 25,000 ceramic bones in Tallahassee, Florida, in April 2012.
