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. Ms. M had immigrated to Canada when she was an adolescent. Ronnis anti-oppressive analysis focused on the disciplinary intent of social works history of excluding the existence of youth sexuality. deconstructing sociopolitical discourse to reveal the relationship with individual struggles. When people wish to make social change, how we talk about people and their place in society cannot be left out of the process. 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 . Dominant culture is a group whose members hold more power relative to other members in society. Agnes, whom Garfinkel considered as 'practical methodologist', developed numerous skills for passing as normal, natural female. When we look outside the boundaries of discourses, we may discover practice questions which help us reflect on power and possibility. 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). Once these dependencies were uncovered, alternatives to opposition emerged. the dominant discourse. As Cannella ( 1997 ) and many others have discussed, these discourses construct childhood as a universal stage of life, where the process of childhood is through the development of a predetermined and . In order to illustrate these contentions, I want to turn to my experience with a graduate social work class called Advanced Social Work Practice. Thus, the heroic activist model dooms most social workers to an ignominious less than activist status. Many times our investigations pointed to opposing discourses - discourses that counteract each other. In contrast, when a concept like uprising is used in the contexts of Ferguson or Baltimore, or "survival" in the context of New Orleans,we deduce very different things about those involved and are more likely to see them as human subjects, rather than dangerous objects. Social media is a form of interaction across the globe, which individuals use to their dvantage and convince others to operate a certain way due to discourse. Discourse theorists disagree on which parts of our world are real. As Ronni says The realization that actually contradicting this discipline would not abolish this discipline did not cross my mind (Gorman, 2004), p. 16). 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. Again, feeling subsumed by the dominant discourse. This vantage point opens opportunities for practice that work towards Ronnis social justice goals. Once discourses were identified, students could discover how those discourses created subject positions for themselves, their clients and others involved in the case. The case involved Ms. M, a single mother of two teenage daughters. 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. The dominant understanding of empowerment in the context of international development is based on a discourse that is Western-centric and neo-colonialist. 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. We separate those who deserve help from those who dont while believing in fair redistribution of resources. Discourse is a coherently-arranged, serious and systematic treatment of a topic in spoken or written language. 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. Practising reflectivity in health and welfare: Making knowledge . For some time now, I have been interested in the role of critical reflection in social work practice (Rossiter, 1996, 2001). 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. New Discourses Commentary. What is discourse in social work? Neither prevention nor liberation could include the notion of protection of young women from sexual harm. Lets take a closer look at the relationships between institutions and discourse. 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. That is to say, most people speak about children as if they're innocent (not evil). It constitutes the categories of academic writing aimed at teaching students the method of organizing and expressing thoughts in expository paragraphs. Discourse refers to how we think and communicate about people, things, the social organization of society, and the relationships among and between all three. Although ageism is prevalent in many forms, one significant manifestation is in and through common discourse. Educators from oneTILT define social identity as having these three characteristics: Exists (or is consistently used) to bestow power, benefits, or disadvantage. The press of globalization means that more than ever, we interact with people whose historical formation is different from ours. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Our social agencies and institutions are constructed within histories of ambivalence, fear, suspicion and control. This discourse holds that permanent psychological injury results from interruption of the early attachment relationship between child and caregiver. 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. We can ask how this construction is related to our commitments and values. 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. Discourse is understood as a way of perceiving, framing, and viewing the world. Understanding these Discourses allows you to develop the power and status you need to be successful, as well as making the bond stronger between you and that secondary Discourse. When "criminals" are "looting," shooting them on site is framed as justified. When Maxine regards Ms. M. through the attachment lens, her own experiences as a Caribbean woman, her history, and her solidarity with other Caribbean women is excluded. 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. 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. 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. New York: Routledge. On Critical Reflection. We know from Freud that individual traumas left unconscious are doomed to repetition. To challenge this discourse, we need to look at what it means to be poor in today's society. Neatly avoiding how workers are constructed, we ascribe burnout to hearing painful stories of others, to stress, doing more with less, dysfunctional organizations and other explanations that implicate individuals. The second case study (Gorman, 2004) takes place during a practicum in a school setting. Historical trauma repeats itself in the small micro interactions of practice. 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. The failures of this fantasy cause us to suffer, to apologize, to despair. The purpose was to analyze how such discourses produced their conceptions of the cases and how they confined their thinking about the case. If we define ideologysimply as ones worldview, which reflects ones socioeconomic position in society, then it follows that ideology influences the formation of institutions and the kinds of discourses that institutions create and distribute. 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 . Unpublished manuscript, Toronto. In this kind of opposition, chances for dialogue about complicated issues, chances for Ronni to promote change through communication of her perspective, and to use the experience of the school personnel for her own learning and growth were limited. London: Routledge. In our class, discourse analysis helped illuminate the production of feelings of individual shame and apology as responses to practice. Stamp, M. (2004). 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. When multiple discourses are uncovered, then we can treat our own perspective as limited, particular, local and contingent as opposed to the adoption of expert professional view as the privileged view. Ronnis practice with Tara was situated within her values about the need for libratory discourses of sexuality for girls. The dominant discourses in our society powerfully influence what gets "storied" and how it gets storied. Discourse transmits and produces power; it undermines and . Fook, J. Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. "Introduction to Discourse in Sociology." 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? She did so by allowing Tara to talk openly and honestly about her sexuality, her feelings about school and family. 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. 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. These reactions may have political worth, but they have the effect of occluding the inevitable messiness of our constructed place, thus leaving the field open for individual self-doubt and apology. He wrote and lectured on the interactions between discourse analysis and social relationships in social work. (1996). Gadamer, H.-G. (1992). 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. Social work practices: Contemporary perspectives on change. Understanding our constructed place in social work depends on identifying how language creates templates of shared understandings. 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. . We want to use our work as a contribution, as something of value to the world. In particular, dominant structures are subject to question because of the ways in which meanings are constructed on oppositional lines (p. 203). Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599. Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. "Introduction to Discourse in Sociology." It aims to understand how language is used in real life situations. Teaching this class was a daunting prospect. Mainstream media typically adopt the dominant state-sanctioned discourse and showcases it by giving airtime and print space to authority figures from those institutions. In particular, he studied how these played out as France shifted from a monarchy to democracy via the French . New Discourses Commentary. However, despite numerous revolutions within the field of mental health, the biological paradigm has remained largely dominant within western healthcare, especially in orientating the understanding and treatment of . Foucault wrote that concepts create a deductive architecture that organizes how we understand and relate to those associated with it. Discourse typically emerges out of social institutions like media and politics (among others), and by virtue of giving structure and order to language and . They also positioned Ronni in relations of opposition to school personnel. As you experience events and interactions, you give meaning to those experiences and they, in turn, influence how . . The post-colonial critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogues . Ronni_Gorman@yahoo.ca. Critical Social Work, 2(1). The biomedical discourse is one of the most influential discourses in the health care profession today (Healy, p. 20). What Is Political Socialization? Thus, Maxine is positioned to assess and discipline Ms. M. She cannot find room for the very insider knowledge she is supposed to have. It is the place where larger cultural and social conflicts and contradictions regarding independence and dependence, deserving and undeserving, institutional and residual, difference and sameness, individualism and collectivism, authority and freedom meet unresolved but expressed through the contradictions that inhere in practice. 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