Neil Bilotta, Ph.D., has joined the UNC School of Social Work as a clinical assistant professor. Bilotta will work closely with Gina Chowa, professor and associate dean for global engagement and director of Global Social Development Innovations, and GSDI’s team of researchers.
Bilotta’s work explores social inclusion and culturally responsive ethics of global social work, including youth participation in evaluation research and social development. He is interested in the ways colonialism and Eurocentric power inform research methodologies and social work interventions with communities who face substantiated subjugation. He has worked with forcibly displaced young people in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, the United States, and Canada.
As a scholar, Bilotta frames his research, teaching, scholarship, and mentoring within an intersectional approach that explores social justice, anti-oppression, social inclusion, and cultural responsivity. His work examines how colonialism, oppression, power, whiteness, privilege, and capitalism inform social work policy, research, theory, and practice, both globally and within North America.
Bilotta completed his doctorate in social work at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His dissertation unpacked the ways “research ethics” are defined and understood by research participants in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya. Moreover, this project examined how researchers, particularly those working in contexts where research partners face marginalization and subjugation, could incorporate socially inclusive and equitable methods, theories, and analysis in their work.
