Perhaps you are a teacher, youth group facilitator, student affairs personnel or manage a team that works with an . New York: Columbia University Press. Mezirow, J. . Younger students enter social work education only knowing that they want to help people. Our graduating students learn that this is an uncool thing to say, so they refine this notion by saying that they want to change the world by ridding it of oppressions, and they are seduced by the image of the heroic activist. Here, I want to gather strands of the previous discussion. When they enter the world of practice, they are thrown into sites constructed by contradictions and ambivalences where their subjectivities as practitioners embody these contradictions, yet they still expect to enact their ideals. The social reality that creates cultural binaries and unfairness. Given the mandate of working with marginalized people, this particular nexus is a place of crushing ambivalence. This paper explores dominant discourses underpinning the social worker visit to children and families and their impact on their purpose, content and focus. 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. Foucault adopted the term 'discourse' to denote a historically contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning. ThoughtCo. 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. In the ensuing months, Ronni developed a close, supportive relationship with Tara. Discourse analysis can enrich progressive social work practices by demonstrating how the language practices through which organizations, theorists, practitioners and service users express their understanding of social work also shape the kinds of practices that occur (Healy, 2000). We frequently found that dependencies within competing discourses were obscured by oppositions. In discussions of immigration reform, the most frequently spoken word was illegal, followed by immigrants, country, border, illegals, and citizens.. In our case, the class project was to scrutinize the knowledge claims embedded in cases and to understand the implication of such claims for their affective relationship to practice as well as on the experience of their clients. 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. Discourse analysis can provide new vantage points from which to reconstruct practice theory in ways that are more consciously oriented to our social justice commitments. We decry racism and declare our allegiance to anti-oppressive practice while working in primarily white agencies. New Discourses Commentary. In our class, discourse analysis helped illuminate the production of feelings of individual shame and apology as responses to practice. Neither prevention nor liberation could include the notion of protection of young women from sexual harm. I had to admit that I saw both discourse from my subject position as a mother, and had to rather sheepishly admit that I wouldnt have wanted my thirteen year old daughter to be having sex at that age. I am arguing that social work, because of its focus on marginalized people, is a concentrated site of social, political and cultural ambivalence and contradiction. 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. . Journal of Progressive Human Services, 7(2), 23-41. 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. 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. Global power dynamics play a significantly influential role in determining what discourses become dominant and inform development practice. 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. Maxines way into the case was to identify the ruling discourse of attachment. Discourses delineate what can be said within a given set of ideas so that critical practice is exercised when we try to look at what is excluded by a particular discourse in order to alternative viewpoints. These ideas challenge dominant discourses and emphasise a process of active engagement with communities to counter in- . 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. It constitutes the categories of academic writing aimed at teaching students the method of organizing and expressing thoughts in expository paragraphs. 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. Second, the current dominant discourse in schools (how people talk about, think about and plan the work of schools and the questions that get asked regarding reform or change) is a hegemonic cultural discourse. They also positioned Ronni in relations of opposition to school personnel. Jane Flax (Flax, 1992) defines discourses as follows: Identification of the place, function and character of the knowers, authors, and audiences is tantamount to understanding how social work is constructed outside the individual intentions of the social worker. Discourse Markers 'Discourse markers' is the term linguists give to the little words like 'well', 'oh', 'but', and 'and' that break our speech up into parts and show the relation between parts. Ronni worked with Tara from a critique of prevention and risk education strategies normally used in dealing with girls sexuality. Social Identities A social identity is both internally constructed and externally applied, occurring simultaneously. The purpose was to analyze how such discourses produced their conceptions of the cases and how they confined their thinking about the case. (1998). What is a dominant discourse? Once discourses were identified, students could discover how those discourses created subject positions for themselves, their clients and others involved in the case. Crucially, it is underpinned by a critical . Social work is placed and places itself outside what are understood as the academic rules for Stamp, M. (2004). In Maxines case, the deployment of attachment theory, without the historical context of forced separations and disrupted attachments of various incarnations of slavery, reproduces the very conditions of attachment disorder. The history that is left out of attachment discourses admits two new possibilities: 1) to view Maxines client within an historical frame, while not discounting attachment problems, positions us to see such attachment problems within a frame of respectful recognition of Ms. M. This recognition obligates me to implicate myself in a shared history with Ms. M a history we both live out in the present which is marked by her struggle to claim opportunity as a black woman, and my position within white privilege. The idea of dominant discourse is important for therapists and counselors, because many people who need therapy and counseling are influenced negatively by the dominant discourses that prevail in their societies (Soal & Kottler, 1996). 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. Scott, J. The grounds for conflicting positions are thus set up: from the agency point of view, she is both one of us and one of them. Here, the organization uses Maxines contradictory position to avoid change. It is a topic worthy of scrutiny (p. 199). Critical reflectivity in education and practice. Flax, J. Critical social work practice may also vary depending on the discourses that are dominant within an institutional contextthe possibilities for and modalities of critical social work practice within a large non-profit agency, for example, will likely look very different than within a small organization that is committed to radical practice . Lastly, dominant and nondominant fall under a secondary Discourse. Another example of a dominant discourse is the discourse around climate change. Unpublished Ph.D., University of Toronto, Toronto. 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. Social work is embedded is in history and is situated in a present which affords no settled practice, no technical fixes, no uncontested views of itself. 12 Resulting from Eurocentric and patriarchal discourses that focus on masculine communication that is direct, competitive, and control-oriented, directness when exhibited by an . In Critical Social Justice, dominance is the yang to oppression's yin. Her mother had immigrated years before, leaving her in the care of her paternal grandparents and a stepfather. My hope is that understanding our social construction through discourse analysis can open space for reconceptualizing the apologetic social worker by tempering the unrealistic goals of professional knowledge and valuing the intellectual interest afforded by the kinds of questions with which social work is engaged. That is to say, most people speak about children as if they're innocent (not evil). 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. We might even think of a discourse as a worldview in action. Further, we interact within the constant presence of historical traumas in which we are all implicated. 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? Thus, ideologies have both a theoretical . Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. "Introduction to Discourse in Sociology." 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. Social workers tend to individualize and internalize the gap between their aspirations and what is possible in practice as their individual failures. Many times our investigations pointed to opposing discourses - discourses that counteract each other. 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. Maxines client, for example, comes to Canada seeking greater opportunity: opportunity that originated over two hundred years ago when my ancestors on the coast of Rhode Island traded with the Caribbean for goods produced by slave labour thus giving birth to the very American capitalism that created the need for Maxines and Ms. Ms migration in search of opportunity. Ideology thus shapes discourse, and, once discourse is infused throughout society, it, in turn, influences the reproduction of ideology. The only problematic area for all the social workers was their difficulty in naming the skills and knowledge used in their practice. In doing so it produces much of what occurs within us and within society. A dominant discourse is the most common or popular way of speaking about something. How do some discourses oppose or resist power? Dominant is any Discourse that will help you in life, or acquire more "goods" (money, status, etc. 1. (2000). 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. Fook, J. A discourse analyst is then less interested in assessing the truth or falsity of the social reality as shaped by a particular discourse, than in the ways that people use language to construct their accounts of their social world. 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. These behaviors and patterns of speech and writing reflect the ideologies of those who have the most power in the society. Ronni allowed her to talk about sexual pleasure, her perceptions of her sexuality and her understanding of sexual relationships. Indeed, Carol- Ann OBrian (O'Brien, 1999) documents the history of prevention of sexuality as the dominate focus of social work literature related to youth sexuality. Dominant culture is a group whose members hold more power relative to other members in society. What Is Political Socialization? (1996). Practising reflectivity in health and welfare: Making knowledge . The case involved a single mother originally from the Caribbean. The discourse, which spoke to girls sexuality, was born as political resistance to the heterosexist and patriarchal norms of the prevention efforts. Ronni sees such a health-based approach as capable of including protection from disease, harm, or sexual exploitation by its emphasis on openness, dialogue, and choice. 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. ThoughtCo, Aug. 28, 2020, thoughtco.com/discourse-definition-3026070. This desire is subjected to the strange twists and turns of which take place inside the institutions of practice. Ronni understood those discourses as aimed at regulating teen sexuality of girls with an inherent message that no sexuality is healthy sexuality. The professional is political: An interpretation of the problem of the past in solution-focused therapy. Ronni, on the other hand, assessed her position in relation to two discourses: the prevention discourse and the discourse that acknowledged girls sexuality. Dominant discourse is a way of speaking or behaving on any given topic it is the language and actions that appear most prevalently within a given society. The words that dominated a 2011 Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News. It thus shapes what we are able to think and know any point in time. Ronni came to see that this discursive position cancelled out the possibility of calling on school personnel as resources for Tara - resources that had the potential to protect her as a young girl with particular vulnerabilities. Gee's definition of Discourse is a theory that explains how language works in society. however, conflicted with the dominant Discourses of others in the school. (2001). When we fail, we describe the result as burnout. 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). Thus, Maxine as a professional is treated with disdainful suspicion by Ms. M. Maxine herself feels to blame for failure to make a difference with the case. It was clear to me that the emotions described in these cases could only be exacerbated by introducing newer and improved practice theories, as if the proper application of such theories could have achieved different outcomes, thus alleviating individual failure. Discourse is a coherently-arranged, serious and systematic treatment of a topic in spoken or written language. These were oppositional discourses. 2) Such recognition allows us to examine practice for the ways that history reproduces itself in our daily actions and reactions. 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. Its evident that discourse is the compilation of particular ideologies and beliefs concerning a certain bracket in the society. Definition and Examples, Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, The Concept of Social Structure in Sociology, The Major Theoretical Perspectives of Sociology, reflects ones socioeconomic position in society, Ph.D., Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, M.A., Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara. Despite Maxines best efforts, this troubled relationship ended in separation when the daughter moved in permanently with a relative. My students came to class as failed heroes. We looked at how these conflicting discourses positioned Ronni, Tara and school personnel. Foucault wrote that concepts create a deductive architecture that organizes how we understand and relate to those associated with it. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. It is a story that cannot be told within the reigning discourse of attachment. It has proved difficult to reconcile conventional theories of practice with a vision of social work as social justice work. 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. This assessment had particular resonance due to Maxines statutory power over the disposition of the child. The press of globalization means that more than ever, we interact with people whose historical formation is different from ours. 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