Original language. Further, they suggest that reflexivity is not simply an augmentation of practice by individual professionals, but a profession-wide responsibility. This theoretical perspective creates discursive boundaries around caregiver and child. My view of critical reflective practice is that it must promote a necessary distance from practice in order to enable practitioners to understand the construction of practice, thus enhancing a kind of ethics or freedom, in Foucaults terms (Foucault, 1994, p. 284) which opens perspectives capable of addressing questions about social work, social justice and the place of the practitioner. Abstract. We looked at how these conflicting discourses positioned Ronni, Tara and school personnel. And into this breach enter social workers with our desire to make a difference, and our theories on how to do that. Marston, G. (2004), Social Policy and Discourse Analysis: Policy Change in Public Housing, Aldershot: Ashgate. In discussions of immigration reform, the most frequently spoken word was illegal, followed by immigrants, country, border, illegals, and citizens.. In other words we challenged the god trick of an all-encompassing, unlocated perspective, in Donna Haraways terms (Haraway, 1988, p. 581). This vantage point enabled students to move from the need to find answers and techniques to the radical acceptance of practice as the unending responsibility for ethical relationships which are always/already jeopardized by larger social relations. Her agency had neither an analysis of the sensitivity of her position in relation to immigrant clients, nor the racist assumptions that grounded these case allocations. She engaged in low level self-mutilation and in sexual activity. Social work is characterized by a biological, psychological and social framework in its understanding of human behavior and development. Mezirow, J. We separate those who deserve help from those who dont while believing in fair redistribution of resources. . This intellectual interest can be found in the ways we re-experience value commitments through openness to the question at the heart of critical social work: What does social work have to do with justice? It is important to consider the role of opposition here. Thus, Maxine is positioned to assess and discipline Ms. M. She cannot find room for the very insider knowledge she is supposed to have. For example: A dominant discourse of gender often positions women as gentle and men as active heroes. But from her constructed perspective as a child protection worker, where attachment discourses dominated the field of explanations, there was little possibility to act in solidarity with Ms. M. Indeed, she was profoundly aware of Ms. Ms anger at Maxines position within Canadian authority, where such authority could not acknowledge the realities that she and Maxine shared. Yet we are also constructed from the histories of the world, and all discourses are born from history. What Is Political Socialization? Particular discourses sustain particular worldviews. Take, for example, the relationship between mainstream media (an institution) and the anti-immigrant discourse that pervades U.S. society. O'Brien, C.-A. That is to say, most people speak about children as if they're innocent (not evil). Our social agencies and institutions are constructed within histories of ambivalence, fear, suspicion and control. As a woman of colour from the Caribbean, Maxine shared experiences with other immigrant women of colour in Canada; shared a cultural heritage, and an insiders knowledge of the difficulties of negotiating these spaces. We acknowledge a knowledge-based economy while making tuition unaffordable. Maxine pointed out, for example, that Caribbean women were previously allowed to immigrate to Canada to take up positions as domestic servants but were expressly forbidden to bring their children. This paper concerns the relation between critical reflective practice and social workers lived experience of the complicated and contradictory world of practice. Elements of postmodern theory provided a way into the achievement of this necessary distance. A postmodern perspective, in Jan Fooks view (Fook, 1999), pays attention to the ways in which social relations and structures are constructed, particularly to the ways in which language, narrative, and discourses shape power relations and our understanding of them. The dominant discourse on immigration, which is anti-immigrant in nature, and endowed with authority and legitimacy, create subject positions like citizenpeople with rights in need of protectionand objects like illegalsthings that pose a threat to citizens. Social workers are the bodies in the middle of this site and must act within the force field of contradictions. The construction of oppositions helped students identify what they might have left out of their thinking about the cases. Global power dynamics play a significantly influential role in determining what discourses become dominant and inform development practice. Dominant discourses can be found in propaganda, cultural messages, and mass media. The Peer specialists with incarceration histories constructed new identities through their training and peer work by valuing experiential knowledge. as social subjects (e.g. Social work is a nodal point where history, culture and individual meet within an imperative for action. Many now use them as a frame of analysis for their research. The summer of 2020 was a season of racial reckoning for journalism in the United States. Our constructed location is often a painful one. "Experience". As such, individuals bear the weight of individual responsibility for such histories and contexts, thus obscuring a greater range of accountability. What exactly does discourse "construct"? 2) Such recognition allows us to examine practice for the ways that history reproduces itself in our daily actions and reactions. I suggest that we gain new vantage points from which to reconstruct practice theory in ways that are more consciously oriented to our social justice commitments. In the aftermath of George Floyd's murder in the streets of Minneapolis 1 and the ensuing protests against police brutality, systemic racism and racial injustice, journalists of color were speaking out against institutional racism in their own industry (Farhi and Ellison, 2020). New York: Routledge. They also positioned Ronni in relations of opposition to school personnel. Finally the strengths perspective will be . Institutions organize knowledge-producing communities and shape the production of discourse and knowledge, all of which is framed and prodded along by ideology. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Corporation. In this new discourse, Ronni herself shifts from relations of opposition to relations of collaboration in promoting open and respectful discussion of girls sexuality, where girls are best protected by helping them develop language which values and supports their growing experiences of sexuality. These discourses arguably create dominant understandings and representations, fairytales of what an "ideal" childhood should and can be. Thus, ideologies have both a theoretical . Its evident that discourse is the compilation of particular ideologies and beliefs concerning a certain bracket in the society. Further to this a task centred approach will be explained and how it could be used when approaching this case study. Lets take a closer look at the relationships between institutions and discourse. This assignment will discuss the case study given whilst firstly looking at the issues of power as well as the risk discourse and how this can be dominant within social work practice. When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. (1999). This is because that insider knowledge is knowledge of historical trauma, injustice, racism and white privilege, and it is certainly outside the boundaries of attachment discourses. Mainstream media typically adopt the dominant state-sanctioned discourse and showcases it by giving airtime and print space to authority figures from those institutions. The power of discourse lies in its ability to provide legitimacy for certain kinds of knowledge while undermining others; and, in its ability to create subject positions, and, to turn people into objects that that can be controlled. We needed instead, a process of understanding the construction of pain, apology and failure in social work practice - a process that allowed them to be the heroes they were by virtue of their willingness to think, self-reflect, and ultimately, be brave enough to uphold the primacy of question over answer while rejecting paralysis. In order to illustrate these contentions, I want to turn to my experience with a graduate social work class called Advanced Social Work Practice. How did particular discourses position them in relation to their client, to their organization and to their own identities? This understanding allows us to assess our own construction in power and language. In this case, the dominant discourse on immigration that comes out of institutions like law enforcement and the legal system is given legitimacy and superiority by their roots in the state. For example, Tonkiss considered different explanations of juvenile crime constructed within discourses In contrast, the immigrants rights discourse that emerges out of institutions like education, politics, and from activist groups, offers the subject category, undocumented immigrant, in place of the object illegal, and is often cast as uninformed and irresponsible by the dominant discourse. The failures of this fantasy cause us to suffer, to apologize, to despair. Ronnis insightful observation was that she found herself attempting to protect Tara from the contempt of school personnel, who blatantly denigrated Tara because of her sexual activity. Despite Maxines best efforts, this troubled relationship ended in separation when the daughter moved in permanently with a relative. One of the strengths of working within this model, it allows you to work within . Critical Social Work, 2(1). The concepts of discourse, power and governmentality have become important in understanding social processes. While not eschewing the need to take positions in other words, without advocating relativism students could look at ways of thinking, at alternative perspectives that were outside the terms of the oppositions. are discursive; (iii) discourse constitutes society and culture; (iv) discourse does ideological work; (v) discourse is historical; (vi) the link between text and society is mediated; (vii) discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory; (viii) discourse is a form of social action (cf. Three types of ideology relating to social work are explored, and it is proposed that such case examples (among others) have, and continue to, maintain a significant influence within state social work. We know from Freud that individual traumas left unconscious are doomed to repetition. We worked to identify oppositions between competing discourses. Following her immigration, she lived only for a short time with her mother, from whom she had been separated for most of her childhood. I was also worried that students coming to class hoping to refine their grasp of narrative therapy, brief therapy, solution-focused therapy or cognitive behavioural therapy, all within the context of an anti-oppressive stance, would be very disappointed by the substitution of esoteric critical ethics for advanced practice. Rossiter, A. These contradictions are at work inside our subjectivity every day it is not an exaggeration to say that our practice is at the mercy of contradictory forces. I am interested in a critical ethics of practice because social workers as people suffer when the results of practice seem so meager in comparison to the ideals inherent in social work education, in agency expectations, and in implicit norms which define professional. In conventional social work education, practitioners are asked to believe that they will learn a theory, and then learn how to implement it. Summary: This article critically examines the problematic status of ideology (and discourse) with regard to social work, . At no time did Ronni focus on getting her to stop.. Contested territory: Sexualities and social work. Rossiter, A. I will outline how critical reflection based on discourse analysis may generate useful perspectives for practitioners who struggle to make sense of the gap between critical aspirations and practice realities. First, we could see how the diagnosis of attachment failure, born as it was in a history of forced separation, continues to reproduce forced separation of Black families in different guises. We began to think about the history of forced separation and forced disruption of families beginning with the importation of African slaves to the Caribbean. These discourses are effects of power, usually when an opposing discourse is mobilized to resist another. When we reflect on what is left out of the discursive construction of our practice, we are stepping back from our immersion in such discourses as reality in order to examine whether our practice is being shaped in ways that contradict or constrain our commitments to social justice. St. Leonards NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin. Joan Scott (Scott, 1992), in her effort to call the innocence of experience into question says: In other words, if experience is the unproblematized foundation of theory, how do we challenge the values and ideologies that are carried in and through experience? How do some discourses oppose or resist power? These alternative viewpoints are important because discourses are structured through power relations so that the identification of what is outside prevailing stories may give us a better picture of how power operates. A conventional course on advanced practice should explicate practice theories, perhaps compare and critically analyze them and then devise methods for their application in practice. As such, discourse, power, and knowledge are intimately connected, and work together to create hierarchies. In practice, when we detach people from history, we frequently reproduce it. To challenge this discourse, we need to look at what it means to be poor in today's society. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and historian interested in the construction of knowledge and power through discourse. When I read the case studies, I was taken aback to find that students chose to write about stories of pain and distress in their practice contexts. Critical reflectivity in education and practice. 131-155). I suggest that this question is a practical practice question which recognizes that our cherished fantasy that practice emanates from theory is rather grandiose in the face of the complex social and historical constructions that produce the moment of practice. Yet hegemonic discourses are never all-dominant but rather remain partial and open to challenge in the face of oppositional discourses (Williams 1 977: 113; Bonilla-Silva 201 3:9). This distance from the immediate thought of practice is enabled by a focus on discursive boundaries, rather than the technical implementation of practice theories that are part of discursive fields. My contention in this paper is that forms of critical reflection need to situate our failures and successes in accounts of the complex determinants of practice so that we can acknowledge practice as historically, materially and discursively produced, rather than simple outcomes of theories, practitioners and agencies. I understand these vantage points in the two case studies I have described in the four ways: 1) an historical consciousness, 2) access to understanding what is left out of discourses in use, 3) understanding of how actors are positioned in discourse, all leading to: 4) a new perspective which exposes the gap between the construction of practice possibilities and social justice values, thus allowing for field of limited and constrained choices which may either narrow the gap, or make clear the impossibility of options and choice in the particular case. Also, she was well-informed about the ways that prevention and risk education inherently set up a trajectory of sex as normatively heterosexual, age appropriate sexual experience. Foucault adopted the term 'discourse' to denote a historically contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning. ), Feminists Theorize the Political (pp. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Revolutions in how mental health problems are conceptualised have had a substantial impact on the work of mental health nurses. Discourses which augment the power of elites are called dominant or official discourses by poststructuralists. On reflection, she sees that the opposition excludes aspects which both discursive positions require the inclusion of protection. The purpose was to analyze how such discourses produced their conceptions of the cases and how they confined their thinking about the case. Foucault was interested in power and social change. New York: Columbia University Press. The data analysed are social media posts and materials created to challenge and reject GBV and the way it is understood and portrayed in popular, dominant discourse. Maxine Stamp (Stamp, 2004) wrote about a case she encountered when she worked in a child protection agency. In particular, dominant structures are subject to question because of the ways in which meanings are constructed on oppositional lines (p. 203). For some time now, I have been interested in the role of critical reflection in social work practice (Rossiter, 1996, 2001). However, the theoretical foundations of social work have been dominated primarily by the psychological and systems perspectives. Indeed, many . These behaviors and patterns of speech and writing reflect the ideologies of those who have the most power in the society. Weinberg, L. (2004). These theories contain values that are supposed to dovetail with practice. Discourse theorists disagree on which parts of our world are real. When we asked the critical question about what is left out of the story of attachment, it became clear that such a story is applied to individuals without regard to history and context. Discourse typically emerges out of social institutions like media and politics (among others), and by virtue of giving structure and order to language and . Some discourses come to dominate the mainstream (dominant discourses), and are considered truthful, normal, and right, while others are marginalized and stigmatized, and considered wrong, extreme, and even dangerous. Such an analysis might allow us to ask the kind of questions that are the heart of social work ethics: How, for example, could we think differently about child welfare practices with black families if our work were guided first and foremost by a desire to find forms of practice that take into account centuries of trauma from racial injustice? Major theorists such as Michel Foucault and Stuart Hall . Practising reflectivity in health and welfare: Making knowledge . Were asked to help but not make people dependent. Discourse typically emerges out of social institutionslike media and politics (among others), and by virtue of giving structure and order to language and thought, it structures and orders our lives, relationships with others, and society. In narrative therapy, there is an emphasis on the stories that you develop and carry with you through your life. I will outline how critical reflection based on discourse analysis may generate useful perspectives for practitioners who struggle to make sense of the gap between critical aspirations and practice realities, and who often mediate that gap as a sense of personal failure. Historian interested in the United States found in propaganda, cultural messages, and knowledge, all of is... No time did Ronni focus on getting her to stop.. Contested territory: Sexualities and framework... Is characterized by a biological, psychological and social work is a point! 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