Class, race, culture, history are excluded as the focus on the dyad is retained as an explanation for family breakdown. In social work, critical practice is crucial because social work is a nexus where social contradictions are manifest. 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. Another example of a dominant discourse is the discourse around climate change. Maxine was devastated at her inability to put the relationship between mother and daughter to rights. In this hope for practice as justice, the responsibility of social work is shifted from change at the more discreet levels of individuals, families, groups, communities, to the social determinants that produce private troubles. From this position, responsibility for the problems were located in the mother, who, in attachment terms, did not properly manage the separation and reunification issues. The overall question I asked students to raise in relation to their cases was what is left out? Interchanging the terms discourse and story, we talked about how stories both include and exclude, forming boundaries in meaning (Spivak, 1990), and that critical practice is the search for what is left outside the story. 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. We know all too well the struggles of the child protection workers, welfare workers, and hospital workers who find it difficult to face the fate of their ideals within the construction of their practice. These students either had significant work experience, or experience in a previous practicum to draw from. What is a dominant discourse? ThoughtCo, Aug. 28, 2020, thoughtco.com/discourse-definition-3026070. A discourse of criminality, when usedto discuss protestors, or those struggling to survive theaftermath of a disaster, like Hurricane Katrina in 2004, structures beliefs about right and wrong, and in doing so, sanctions certain kinds of behavior. Even in the face of power differentials, they challenged dominant discourses directly and indirectly and advocated for various forms of help for the people with whom they worked. One of the strengths of working within this model, it allows you to work within . Ronnis approach had an explicitly political agenda: she opposed prevention discourses as ways of silencing female desire. 14) through which certain social phenomena, such as 'need', 'knowledge' and 'intervention', are constructed. 131-155). In taking up that alignment, she positioned herself as Taras protector her shield against school personnel with their regressive focus on prevention of acknowledgment of sexuality. In class, we worked to identify the existence of two, opposing discourses: one was the prevention and risk education approach of the school and the other was Ronnis libratory approach to girls and sexuality. Such questioning opens up as social workers attempt to account for their own social construction within the cultural construct of social work. A discourse is a system of words, actions, rules, and beliefs that share common values. Disrupting the Dominant Discourse: Rethinking. The end of innocence. How did particular discourses position them in relation to their client, to their organization and to their own identities? Throughout our analyses, we worked to understand what views discourses permitted or inhibited. The biomedical discourse is one of the most influential discourses in the health care profession today (Healy, p. 20). Such a process enabled them to stand back from the scope of their practice in order to understand its construction within a particular discursive space. (2000). 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. Social Identities A social identity is both internally constructed and externally applied, occurring simultaneously. 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? In doing so, we increase our choices or at least, our awareness regarding how we participate in the creation of culture. Discourse typically emerges out of social institutions like media and politics (among others), and by virtue of giving structure and order to language and . These theories contain values that are supposed to dovetail with practice. Michel Foucault. Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. (2020, August 28). In discussions of immigration reform, the most frequently spoken word was illegal, followed by immigrants, country, border, illegals, and citizens.. Abstract. Thus, I have found myself on the terrain of a kind of critical ethics that views practice theories as stories about the cultural ideals of practice, and that treats practitioners experiences as stories that can teach us about the conduct of practice in relation to such ideals. This discursive position effectively disallowed a subject position of another sort: solidarity with her client. Ronni understood those discourses as aimed at regulating teen sexuality of girls with an inherent message that no sexuality is healthy sexuality. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. (1996). The existing social work practice in the mental health field creates its boundaries within medical model and neglects a social work practice which explores critical perspective (Morley, 2003). Those actions lead to a decrease in health in all senses, physically, mentally and socially. Thus, Maxine is positioned to assess and discipline Ms. M. She cannot find room for the very insider knowledge she is supposed to have. The hold of possessive individualism in the helping professions means that the target of practice is the individual, community, or family in the present . 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. She had two teen-aged daughters who had been left in the country of origin as very young children while Ms. M established herself in Canada. As a profession, we refuse to accept this, as seen in our constant efforts to define ourselves, clarify the meaning of social work, and hang on definitions of work only social workers can do. Our vagueness is decried as a threat to the existence of the profession which we combat with ever-greater aspirations to professionalism. 'Oh' prepares the hearer for a surprising or just-remembered item, and 'but' indicates that sentence to follow is in opposition to the one before. Discourse, as a social construct, is created and perpetuated . Social work is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes social change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people. What Is Political Socialization? The case involved Ms. M, a single mother of two teenage daughters. In narrative therapy, there is an emphasis on the stories that you develop and carry with you through your life. For example: A dominant discourse of gender often positions women as gentle and men as active heroes. 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. (French social theorist Michel Foucaultwrote prolifically about institutions, power, and discourse. Contested territory: Sexualities and social work. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Corporation. Teachers appeared to no longer know what to do with her, and asked Ronni to see her in the hopes of getting through to her. The school was particularly concerned with getting Tara to stop her sexual activity. "Experience". New Discourses Commentary. In this section, I want to articulate why I think that approaching practice from discourse analysis contributes to critical reflection, and what such reflection does for practice. Practising reflectivity in health and welfare: Making knowledge . In other words, they take different ontological stances.Extreme constructivists argue that all human knowledge and experience is socially constructed, and that there is no reality beyond discourse (Potter 1997).Critical realists, on the other hand, argue that there is a physical . It thus shapes what we are able to think and know any point in time. In J. Butler & J. Scott (Eds. With trepidation, I began the class by asking students to submit a case study from their practice experience that they would like to study collectively using a form of discourse analysis. Educators from oneTILT define social identity as having these three characteristics: Exists (or is consistently used) to bestow power, benefits, or disadvantage. Take, for example, the relationship between mainstream media (an institution) and the anti-immigrant discourse that pervades U.S. society. 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. With the achievement of this necessary distance Ronni was able to formulate new possibilities for practice. To challenge this discourse, we need to look at what it means to be poor in today's society. For example, Tonkiss considered different explanations of juvenile crime constructed within discourses Maxine Stamp (Stamp, 2004) wrote about a case she encountered when she worked in a child protection agency. 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. In particular, dominant structures are subject to question because of the ways in which meanings are constructed on oppositional lines (p. 203). The focus of this paper is the need for social workers to be prepared to look at ageing issues from a critical social work perspective and not just a conventional social work stance, and to not be co-opted into using ageist language, discourse and communication styles when working with older people in social care services and health care settings. Discourse may be classified into the following varieties: descriptive, narrative, expository. These elements helped students writing cases from memories saturated with unease about their own performance to shift from what I did to how the case was constructed, and how their feelings arose from the complicated constructions of their practice within particular locations and time. Goodreads. With the increasing prevalence of neo-conservative and managerial discourses, it is argued that a dominant focus on individualism diminishes the understanding of how the social context can impact on people's lives (Houston, 2016) and moves away from collectivist values . It is a story that cannot be told within the reigning discourse of attachment. Ms. M had immigrated to Canada when she was an adolescent. Because discourse has so much meaning and deeply powerful implications in society, it is often the site of conflict and struggle. 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. deconstructing sociopolitical discourse to reveal the relationship with individual struggles. We can raise questions about practices that may be outside such reproduction. Maxine was routinely assigned cases involving immigrant people of colour because she herself is an immigrant woman of colour. Once these dependencies were uncovered, alternatives to opposition emerged. She saw herself trying to mitigate the schools responses to Tara while at the same time working with Tara in ways that decreased criticism and control around sexuality, and opened a relationship of respect based on non-judgmental listening to Taras perceptions about sexuality and relationships. Van Dijk, 1995:353; Jahedi, Abdullah &Mukundan, 2014:29). 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. Its evident that discourse is the compilation of particular ideologies and beliefs concerning a certain bracket in the society. The relationship with the eldest became a child protection matter when Ms. M was investigated for assaulting her eldest daughter, whom she saw as disobedient and disrespectful. In this case, those discourses were set up with the prevention and risk discourse as repressive and the validation of sexuality discourse as progressive and libratory for young women. Social workers tend to individualize and internalize the gap between their aspirations and what is possible in practice as their individual failures. Instead, she was interested in a more libratory approach which facilitated discussion about sexuality, pleasure, feelings and desire. These behaviors and patterns of speech and writing reflect the ideologies of those who have the most power in the society. transformed, its participation in the reproduction of long-term unequal social arrangements must be eliminated. 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. Discourse refers to how we think and communicate about people, things, the social organization of society, and the relationships among and between all three. How do some discourses oppose or resist power? In J. Butler & J. Scott (Eds. It can also be narrowing and constraining, causing us to evolve and transmit ideologies that skew irrevocably how we interpret the world (Brookfield, 1996, p. 36). 1 Such templates are the discourses through which particular practices are made possible. The failures of this fantasy cause us to suffer, to apologize, to despair. Relatively little published research explores issues pertaining to menstruation in school education. I understand these vantage points in the case studies I will describe as: 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 set of questions which expose the gap between the construction of practice possibilities and social justice values, thus allowing for a new understanding of the limitations, constraints and possibilities within the context of the practice problem. Many times our investigations pointed to opposing discourses - discourses that counteract each other. Flax, J. Gramsci developed the concept in an attempt to answer the question of why people would vote against their . Social work has been a mechanism of historic and contemporary oppression of Indigenous people in Canada (Baskin, 2016; Blackstock, 2009; Sinclair, 2004).Using moralizing and normalizing discourses, social work has advanced a state-sanctioned, settler colonialist agenda that has harmed Indigenous individuals, families, and communities over generations.
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