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. As one of us, she is expected to deploy white, Western knowledge with her Caribbean clients - clients she is given because of her special knowledge. In other words, she embodies the contradiction between professional expectations to deploy Eurocentric knowledge while also being positioned to deliver service to those who are an exception to that knowledge. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 7(2), 23-41. 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. It is important to understand how the opposition itself locks out practice opportunities. Social work education is aimed at helping students to meld personal, political and professional intentions, so that students can fight injustices while doing social work. Discourses facilitate the process by which certain information comes to be accepted as unquestionable truth. Critical case study: My experience with Tara .Unpublished manuscript, Toronto. Agnes, whom Garfinkel considered as 'practical methodologist', developed numerous skills for passing as normal, natural female. 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. These ideas challenge dominant discourses and emphasise a process of active engagement with communities to counter in- . My students came to class as failed heroes. Unpublished Ph.D., University of Toronto, Toronto. 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. 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. In social work, critical practice is crucial because social work is a nexus where social contradictions are manifest. Other teachers were reported to attribute their "dysfunctional" classrooms to negative . 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. Spivak, G. (1990). John J. Rodger: John J. Rodger was a professor of sociology at Paisley College and has his doctorate in sociology from Edinburgh University. 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. 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. Following her immigration, she lived only for a short time with her mother, from whom she had been separated for most of her childhood. Introduction. She has taught and researched at institutions including the University of California-Santa Barbara, Pomona College, and University of York. 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. Relatively little published research explores issues pertaining to menstruation in school education. Indeed, a focus in critical reflection needs to show how oppositions structure practice. Perhaps an alternative way to understand burnout is to see it as deep disappointment that results when we are unable to enact the values we hold and have been encouraged to hold, and when that disappointment is interpolated as our fault or the agencys fault, at the expense of understanding the social construction of the failure. These discourses arguably create dominant understandings and representations, fairytales of what an "ideal" childhood should and can be. 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. In other words, such a trajectory works to normalize a sequence of sexuality which ranges from the right time to the end-stage of heterosexual marriage. 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. 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. Taking the case of racially charged events in Ferguson, MO, and Baltimore, MD that played out from 2014 through 2015, we can also see Foucaults articulation of the discursive concept at play. ), Transforming social work practice: Postmodern critical perspectives. In such a way, Ronni undoes the opposition between risk and liberation, and also revises her relationship to school personnel from that of shielding youth like Tara from harm, to calling on them to reconstruct the discourses through which girls sexuality is understood, and viewing them as potential resources in protecting Tara. Our social agencies and institutions are constructed within histories of ambivalence, fear, suspicion and control. In doing so it produces much of what occurs within us and within society. This paper explores dominant discourses underpinning the social worker visit to children and families and their impact on their purpose, content and focus. Gorman, R. (2004). Major theorists such as Michel Foucault and Stuart Hall . Introduction to Discourse in Sociology. Ronnis approach had an explicitly political agenda: she opposed prevention discourses as ways of silencing female desire. second revised edition ed.). We draw on theories within social gerontology whilst also . Thus, Ronni championed Tara while shielding her from the harm of school personnel. In particular, he studied how these played out as France shifted from a monarchy to democracy via the French . For example, Tonkiss considered different explanations of juvenile crime constructed within 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. Scott, J. Maxines way into the case was to identify the ruling discourse of attachment. as doctors or patients), and it is these social effects of discourse that are focused on in discourse analysis. Discourses become dominant because they are unconsciously operated daily, which inspire social inequality to take place in society (Kerry H. Robinson show more content Critical discourse analysis (or discourse analysis) is a research method for studying written or spoken language in relation to its social context. Another example of a dominant discourse is the discourse around climate change. With the achievement of this necessary distance Ronni was able to formulate new possibilities for practice. Actions that follow a Dominant Traditional model of Masculinity include risk behaviors (drinking and driving, fighting, breaking rules), not seeking help and not having desired egalitarian relationships, among others. His theory of Discourse is grounded in social and cultural views of literacy. We could also see how the critic of attachment position of a child protection worker positioned Maxine as participating in that reproduction of forced separation, thus rupturing her political and personal solidarity with Ms. M. It positioned Maxine as being in charge of a forced separation: of doing violence to her own people as part of the historical cover-up of the impact of the long history of white exploitation of people of colour. (Gee 8). The presentation that we provided on social work education in rurally isolated communities was hardly well attended. Take, for example, the relationship between mainstream media (an institution) and the anti-immigrant discourse that pervades U.S. society. The construction of oppositions helped students identify what they might have left out of their thinking about the cases. There may be ethical dilemmas that need to be resolved via ethics codes and decision-making schema, but practitioners will follow the prescriptions of liberalism by making correct decisions, craftily implementing theory through the right interventions, and now, even overturning racism, classism and sexism in the process. In this sense, sociologists frame discourse as a productive force because it shapes our thoughts, ideas, beliefs, values, identities, interactions with others, and our behavior. 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. 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. 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. Foucault adopted the term 'discourse' to denote a historically contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning. Understanding our constructed place in social work depends on identifying how language creates templates of shared understandings. Further, we interact within the constant presence of historical traumas in which we are all implicated. At no time did Ronni focus on getting her to stop.. 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. She engaged in low level self-mutilation and in sexual activity. This is how discourse analysis can displace the individualism of the heroic activist in favour of a more nuanced, complex and sophisticated analysis. We might even think of a discourse as a worldview in action. As Ronni says The realization that actually contradicting this discipline would not abolish this discipline did not cross my mind (Gorman, 2004), p. 16). 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. 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. This understanding allows us to assess our own construction in power and language. 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). Although ageism is prevalent in many forms, one significant manifestation is in and through common discourse. When oppositions are in place, what boundaries are erected? Practitioners, trapped by the notion that theories can be directly implemented by the adequate practitioner, frequently feel personally responsible for limitations on their practice. Biomedicine is a dominant and pervasive model in health care settings and there are strengths and limitations in working within the this discourse. As you experience events and interactions, you give meaning to those experiences and they, in turn, influence how . Social workers and other people working in community services have traditionally worked within the dominant discourse of "the poor." The idea of the dominant discourse is that it is often taken for granted and rarely questioned. I draw on his theories in this discussion). 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. These wordsreflect and reproduce very particular values, ideas, and beliefs about immigrants and U.S. citizensideas about rights, resources, and belonging. In our class, discourse analysis helped illuminate the production of feelings of individual shame and apology as responses to practice. Healy, K. (2000). Ronnis anti-oppressive analysis focused on the disciplinary intent of social works history of excluding the existence of youth sexuality. Thus, Maxine is positioned to assess and discipline Ms. M. She cannot find room for the very insider knowledge she is supposed to have. Michel Foucault. Openness to questions about the constitution of practice iscritical practice. 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. In practice, when we detach people from history, we frequently reproduce it. 14) through which certain social phenomena, such as 'need', 'knowledge' and 'intervention', are constructed. Maxine was routinely assigned cases involving immigrant people of colour because she herself is an immigrant woman of colour. 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. The purpose was to analyze how such discourses produced their conceptions of the cases and how they confined their thinking about the case. The . I would like to turn to two case studies which illustrate how discourse analysis was used by students. Social Identities A social identity is both internally constructed and externally applied, occurring simultaneously. 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. Haraway, D. (1988). We decry racism and declare our allegiance to anti-oppressive practice while working in primarily white agencies. These students either had significant work experience, or experience in a previous practicum to draw from. 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. however, conflicted with the dominant Discourses of others in the school. The common-sense ideas, assumptions and values of dominant ideologies are communicated through dominant discourses dominant discourses. Particular discourses sustain particular worldviews. 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. 131-155). But how do we scrutinize knowledge claims? In discussions of immigration reform, the most frequently spoken word was illegal, followed by immigrants, country, border, illegals, and citizens.. 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