Affilia

About Affilia

Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work — Journal Profile

Affilia, now published under the full title Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work, is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by SAGE Publications and devoted to social work viewed through critical feminist perspectives. It occupies a position no other social work journal claims in quite the same way: SAGE and the journal's own editors describe it as a peer-reviewed scholarly social work journal written from feminists' points of view, and its editors have called it the first and only feminist social work academic journal. Founded in 1986, it has for four decades published research reports, new theory and creative approaches that challenge taken-for-granted knowledge about gender, power and social welfare.

This profile is anchored to the Journals World record titled simply Affilia, published by SAGE Publishing, print ISSN 0886-1099 and electronic ISSN 1552-3020. Two title changes confuse readers. The journal was founded as Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, and around its thirty-fifth anniversary the subtitle was changed to Feminist Inquiry in Social Work to reflect, in the editors' words, a feminism that has never been solely for or about women and is more than a fixed personal identity or political doctrine. Citations before and after that change refer to the same journal, the same ISSNs and the same SAGE journal code, and literature searches should use both subtitles together with the single-word title Affilia.

Quick Facts

The date and the subtitle change are the two facts readers most often get wrong. A reference that gives the journal a start date other than 1986, or that treats Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work and Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work as two different journals, is mistaken: SAGE's own journal history describes the 1986 founding and the editorial announcing the new subtitle was published in the journal itself in 2021, thirty-five years after launch, explicitly as a renaming of the same title.

History and Editorial Identity

SAGE's journal history records that in 1986 the founding editors created Affilia as a dedicated space for feminist voices, aiming to fill a gap in mainstream social work journals, which did not publish articles focused on issues concerning women. The founding editor was Beatrice Saunders. The founders' mission, quoted in the journal's own anniversary editorial, was a commitment to fostering the development of feminist values, theories and knowledge as they relate to social work research, education and practice, and the original title was chosen to share what the women's movement had brought to the social worker's view of the world, the client's world, and the world's world.

That history is not decorative. The present editorial board states that it takes an intersectional approach to gender, is intentional about including perspectives of those at the margins and the experiences of minoritised bodies, and embraces a responsibility to trouble its own views and assumptions. It describes a commitment, within its editorial process, to centring an ethics of care, foregrounding relationships, and facilitating the development of critical feminist perspectives. It also states plainly that it is committed to interrogating social work's own complex discursive histories, which include harms and erasures as well as liberatory practices. A prospective author should therefore expect reviewers who ask not only whether a study is technically sound, but also whose knowledge it centres, whose experience it treats as marginal, and whether its conclusions reproduce the arrangements it claims to criticise.

The 2021 editorial “Critical Feminisms: Principles and Practices for Feminist Inquiry in Social Work” set out the current programme. The editors explain that they use “critical” deliberately, in two senses — analysis and critique, and essential or necessary — and to distinguish their position from versions of feminism that have been co-opted by commercial or purely individual-choice framings and that can reinforce rather than challenge the status quo. They draw on intersectionality as critical social theory, and they present the journal's pages as a platform for continued engagement with what critical feminisms mean. A later collective editorial on positionality added a practical expectation: authors and reviewers should examine their own social locations — across race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, immigration status, religion, class, age and ability — and explain how those locations shape the knowledge they produce. Positionality, in that editorial's argument, is not an optional paragraph but an essential component of socially just research.

Aims and Scope in Detail

SAGE's description states that Affilia is dedicated to the discussion and development of critical feminist values, theories and knowledge as they relate to social work and social welfare research, education and practice, and that its intent is to bring insight and knowledge to the task of eliminating discrimination and oppression, especially with respect to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, age and disability. The newer SAGE wording adds that contemporary feminisms in the journal are rooted in critical, intersectional analyses of lived experience in the context of complex structures, systems and discourses of power and privilege, and that the journal resists the erasure of histories of social movements and liberation struggles.

In practice, the scope breaks into several recognisable families. First, empirical feminist social work research: studies of services, interventions, workforces and client experiences that use feminist theory or methodology rather than merely sampling women. Second, conceptual and theoretical work that develops, revises or contests feminist thinking in social work — including work on care ethics, intersectionality, and the profession's own history. Third, practice and praxis writing that connects theory to what social workers actually do, in settings from child protection and anti-violence work to health, disability and community practice. Fourth, education and pedagogy: how feminist content is taught, how students and educators experience it, and how curricula reproduce or challenge inequity — a recent conceptual paper, for example, examined feminist social work pedagogy through critical feminist narrative analysis and situation analysis using literary texts. Fifth, critical reviews of the literature that read a field through a feminist lens, such as a review assessing animal-assisted intervention research through critical disability theory. Sixth, book reviews and creative or artwork contributions, which SAGE explicitly includes in what the journal publishes.

Recent article themes show the range. Work on women who have used force, written from United States and Australian legal and anti-violence settings, used an intersectional framework to argue against a simple victim–offender binary in police, court, corrections, intervention and child protection systems. Work on the feminist ethic of care examined mothering among sex workers in Mumbai. An autoethnographic article used social construction, feminist theory and ambiguous loss to discuss gender identity, health systems and reconstruction of the self, with recommendations for social work education. An article on missing and murdered Indigenous women argued for Indigenous-led responses to trafficking, written by Indigenous practitioners and academics. Together these examples demonstrate two scope rules: the setting may be anywhere in the world and the method may be qualitative, quantitative, conceptual, historical, autoethnographic or creative — but the feminist analysis must be load-bearing. Remove it, and the paper no longer belongs in this journal.

What is out of scope follows from that rule. A conventional programme evaluation with no gender or power analysis, a clinical technique paper that treats social context as background, or a study of women service users that never questions the categories it uses will be judged a poor fit even if its methods are competent. Equally, purely rhetorical writing with no scholarly grounding — no literature, no method, no evidence or no sustained argument — is unlikely to survive a board that describes the work it seeks as interdisciplinary, groundbreaking and thought-provoking scholarship that raises new questions and generates innovative theories and methodologies.

Readership and Who Should Submit

The journal is read by social work academics, doctoral and qualifying-course educators, feminist researchers in adjacent fields such as gender studies, sociology, public health and law, and practitioners who use feminist frameworks in anti-violence, family, health and community work. Authors should write for that mixed audience: define specialist terms from other disciplines, explain practice settings for readers in other countries, and make the social work implication explicit even when the data come from a neighbouring field. International authors are welcomed — the journal states that it seeks scholarship reflecting feminist social work's global diversity — but a study rooted in one national welfare system should help readers elsewhere understand what is local law or custom and what travels.

Strong candidate submissions include feminist empirical studies in any social work setting; theoretical papers that genuinely move a debate; intersectional analyses of policy or services; critical accounts of social work education; first-person and autoethnographic work that is theorised rather than merely confessional; and reviews that re-read a literature through feminist or disability, anti-racist or decolonial lenses in combination with feminism. Newer scholars are not excluded — SAGE's author questions explain how a new scholar or recent graduate can seek involvement as a guest reviewer or book reviewer by contacting the editor-in-chief with areas of expertise in content, methods and theory — but the standard for a research article is the same for everyone.

Peer Review and the Editorial Process

SAGE's published answers for this journal give a realistic picture of the process. If a submission is selected for review, a decision is typically made within several weeks, depending on reviewer availability, and manuscripts may go through several rounds of review before a final decision. That wording contains an important preliminary step: selection for review. Editors first judge fit and feminist framing, and work that is out of scope can be returned at that stage. Authors should therefore treat the cover material and the opening pages as part of the assessment, stating plainly the feminist framework, the social work relevance and the contribution to theory, research, practice or teaching.

All editorial decisions are described by SAGE as final for a manuscript that is not accepted for review, although authors are encouraged to consider submitting other work. If a manuscript is accepted, it goes through a final round of edits with SAGE and is published in the OnlineFirst section of Affilia with a DOI, and is later batched into an upcoming quarterly issue. This two-stage appearance matters for citation: cite the DOI and the OnlineFirst date when you first use an article, and update to volume, issue and pages once it is assigned to an issue. The journal's own long-serving format is quarterly — volume 36, for example, appeared in 2021, thirty-five years after volume 1 — so a delay between online and issue publication is normal scheduling, not a problem with an accepted paper.

On involvement beyond authorship, SAGE states that the journal puts out an annual call for applications for Consulting Editor and Editorial Board Member positions. Readers interested in reviewing should follow that route or contact the editor-in-chief about guest reviewing, rather than contacting individual board members about a live submission.

Indexing, Metrics and How to Quote Them

Reference listings state that Affilia is abstracted and indexed in Scopus and the Social Sciences Citation Index. SAGE's own abstracting list for the journal is considerably longer and includes, among others, Academic Search Premier and Elite, Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (ASSIA), CINAHL, Criminal Justice Abstracts, Family and Society Studies Worldwide, PsycINFO, SafetyLit, Social Services Abstracts, Social Work Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, Studies on Women Abstracts and Social SciSearch. Authors whose institutions count a specific service should check that service's current source list by ISSN, because abstracting lists are revised and a listing reproduced on a publisher page is a starting point for verification, not the verification itself.

The dated metric available in reference material is a 2021 Journal Citation Reports impact factor of 1.597. It is quoted here with its year because that is the only honest way to quote it. Resurchify-style and other aggregator pages circulate other numbers for other years and for other measures such as CiteScore and SNIP; mixing those measures in a single sentence, or presenting any of them without a year and a source, produces the misleading comparisons that promotion and tenure committees increasingly reject. If you need the journal's present standing, take it from the current Journal Citation Reports or Scopus release at the time you apply, and name the release. No current impact factor is stated in this profile because a current verified figure was not retrieved from an official metrics source for it.

Preparing a Manuscript That Fits

Begin with the framework. Name the feminist theory or tradition you are using, explain why it fits your question, and show where it changed a design decision — a sampling choice, an interview prompt, an analytic category or an interpretation. A paragraph that lists feminist authors without using them will not do this work. Next, address positionality in the way the board's own editorial recommends: who the researchers are in relation to participants and setting, and how that shaped access, interpretation and limits. Then handle categories critically. If your study uses administrative categories for gender, race, disability or family form, say whose categories they are and what they may conceal. In the discussion, return to social work: what should a practitioner, educator, service manager or policymaker do differently because of this paper? Finally, write accessibly across disciplines. The journal is interdisciplinary by design, so unexplained jargon from social work, law, medicine or theory narrows your readership without adding rigour.

Creative and shorter pieces should follow the journal's current author guidelines on the SAGE site for format and length, and book reviewers should normally be commissioned or agreed with the relevant editor rather than submitting an unsolicited review of a book of their own choosing. In all cases, check the SAGE submission guidelines at the point of submission for referencing style, ethics and consent statements, funding and conflict disclosures, and requirements on anonymisation for peer review, since SAGE updates these centrally.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Affilia the same journal as Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work? Yes. That was the former subtitle. The current subtitle is Feminist Inquiry in Social Work; the title, publisher and ISSNs are unchanged.

When was Affilia founded, and by whom? In 1986, by founding editors who wanted a dedicated space for feminist voices in social work. Beatrice Saunders is recorded as founding editor.

How often does it appear? Quarterly, with accepted articles normally appearing first in OnlineFirst with a DOI.

Who edits it? Reference listings name Sara Goodkind, Mimi E. Kim and Jennifer Zelnick as editors-in-chief, with affiliations at the University of Pittsburgh, California State University, Long Beach, and the Touro University System respectively. Verify the current masthead on SAGE before writing to the editors.

Does it publish work by authors outside social work departments? It publishes interdisciplinary scholarship. The test is feminist inquiry applied to social work or social welfare research, education or practice, not the author's departmental address.

How long does review take? SAGE states that, if a submission is selected for review, a decision is typically made within several weeks depending on reviewer availability, and several rounds of review are possible.

Is it indexed in Scopus and the Social Sciences Citation Index? Reference and publisher listings say yes. Verify by ISSN in the current source list of the service your institution requires.

What impact factor should I quote? A year-stamped one. Reference material gives 1.597 for 2021. Consult the current Journal Citation Reports for a present figure rather than reusing that dated number.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on SAGE Publications' own pages for Affilia (journal description, history, abstracting list and author questions on review timing, OnlineFirst publication and board recruitment), the journal's 2021 editorial on critical feminisms and its collective editorial on positionality, the Journals World record for post 346877 (title Affilia, SAGE Publishing, ISSNs 08861099 and 15523020), and the journal's bibliographic reference entry for founding, editorship, frequency and the dated 2021 metric. Facts that could not be verified from those sources, including a current impact factor and any current publishing charge, have been left unstated rather than estimated.