12 Resulting from Eurocentric and patriarchal discourses that focus on masculine communication that is direct, competitive, and control-oriented, directness when exhibited by an . . Given the mandate of working with marginalized people, this particular nexus is a place of crushing ambivalence. 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. Ronnis analysis moved beyond opposition through a new discourse of health-oriented openness to girls sexuality in which protection is configured as part of healthy sexuality. It is important to consider the role of opposition here. In other words, from a poststructural point of view, discourses are the sets of language practices that shape our thoughts, actions and even our identities," as quoted from Karen Healy, 2014, p. 3. Many times our investigations pointed to opposing discourses - discourses that counteract each other. The social reality that creates cultural binaries and unfairness. Michel Foucault. Goodreads. John J. Rodger: John J. Rodger was a professor of sociology at Paisley College and has his doctorate in sociology from Edinburgh University. 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. It is a topic worthy of scrutiny (p. 199). 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. We want to use our work as a contribution, as something of value to the world. Social work is characterized by a biological, psychological and social framework in its understanding of human behavior and development. 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. Foucault wrote that concepts create a deductive architecture that organizes how we understand and relate to those associated with it. but by the demands of the dominant group within the . Ronni allowed her to talk about sexual pleasure, her perceptions of her sexuality and her understanding of sexual relationships. Pregnant with possibility: Reducing ethical trespasses in social work practice with young single mothers. 14) through which certain social phenomena, such as 'need', 'knowledge' and 'intervention', are constructed. 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. The failures of this fantasy cause us to suffer, to apologize, to despair. As such, discourse, power, and knowledge are intimately connected, and work together to create hierarchies. The case involved Ms. M, a single mother of two teenage daughters. Attachment theories are common explanations of the parent/child conflict in some immigrant families experiences of separation and reunification during patterns of immigration. 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. 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. 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. 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. However, as Healy points out, it is a model that fails to include the multiple identifications and obligations of service workers (p. 136). This paper is based on the results of an Australian survey of 5007 young women aged 13-25, which examined their experiences of menstruation and dysmenorrhea. The Peer specialists with incarceration histories constructed new identities through their training and peer work by valuing experiential knowledge. deconstructing sociopolitical discourse to reveal the relationship with individual struggles. 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. Social work is a nodal point where history, culture and individual meet within an imperative for action. 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. Ronnis anti-oppressive analysis focused on the disciplinary intent of social works history of excluding the existence of youth sexuality. The words that dominated a 2011 Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News. Unpublished Ph.D., University of Toronto, Toronto. 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. 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. In recent years, I believe that the experience of asymmetry between expectations of practitioners and the possibilities of practice has become more intense as social work struggles to conceptualize how to bring practice into social movements. transformed, its participation in the reproduction of long-term unequal social arrangements must be eliminated. Biomedicine is a dominant and pervasive model in health care settings and there are strengths and limitations in working within the this discourse. A discourse is a system of words, actions, rules, and beliefs that share common values. Once these dependencies were uncovered, alternatives to opposition emerged. Ideology thus shapes discourse, and, once discourse is infused throughout society, it, in turn, influences the reproduction of ideology. We decry racism and declare our allegiance to anti-oppressive practice while working in primarily white agencies. Stamp, M. (2004). Rossiter, A. Brookfield, S. (1996). Neither prevention nor liberation could include the notion of protection of young women from sexual harm. But how do we scrutinize knowledge claims? I will describe two examples of discourse-based case studies, and show how the conceptual space that is opened by such reflection can help social workers gain a necessary distance from the complexity of their ambivalently constructed place. Such questioning opens up as social workers attempt to account for their own social construction within the cultural construct of social work. Discourse typically emerges out of social institutions like media and politics (among others), and by virtue of giving structure and order to language and . O'Brien, C.-A. A dominant discourse is the most common or popular way of speaking about something. For example, Ronni mobilizes a libratory discourses as a way of resisting prevention discourses. People with mental illnesses are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, and discourses concerning the medical model, criminalization, and criminality dominate the intervention . How did some discursive positions conflict with their own self-knowledge? Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599. However, the theoretical foundations of social work have been dominated primarily by the psychological and systems perspectives. 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. Were asked to help but not make people dependent. The second case study (Gorman, 2004) takes place during a practicum in a school setting. Discourse about social work In this article, I argue that a discourse about social work exists, and that within this discourse is found a 'truth' about social work as a practical, rather than a theoretical, enterprise. How do some discourses oppose or resist power? You: Hmm, that's . As such, discourse is imbued with attitudes and . On Critical Reflection. Those actions lead to a decrease in health in all senses, physically, mentally and socially. Conclusion. Taylor, C., & White, S. (2000). We began to think about the ways slavery is replicated in different incarnations following the end of slavery. Dominant discourse demonstrates how reality has been socially constructed. (1998). 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. 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. Innocence lost and suspicion found: Do we educate for or against social work? Yet, as Linda Weinberg (Weinberg, 2004), in her work on the construction of practice judgments, notes that to locate ethics within the actions of individual practitioners, as if they were free to make decisions irrespective of the broader environment in which they work, is to neglect the significant ways that structures shape those constructions and to erect an impossible standard for those embodies practitioners mired in institutional regimes, working with finite resources and conflicting requirements and expectations (Weinberg, 2004, p.204). Ronnis practice with Tara was situated within her values about the need for libratory discourses of sexuality for girls. Foucault adopted the term 'discourse' to denote a historically contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning. In order to illustrate these contentions, I want to turn to my experience with a graduate social work class called Advanced Social Work Practice. 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. It aims to understand how language is used in real life situations. 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. 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. The sense of the multiple stories at play helped relocate the notion of experience as brute reality carrying authority by virtue of being real to a notion of experience as constructed, contingent, and always interpreted. 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. I draw on his theories in this discussion). In A. Chambon & A. Irving & L. Epstein (Eds. 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. An ideology is defined as a system of beliefs and values that not only seek to describe the world but also to transform it. 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. Dominant is any Discourse that will help you in life, or acquire more "goods" (money, status, etc. Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. (2020, August 28). Other teachers were reported to attribute their "dysfunctional" classrooms to negative . 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. 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. These students either had significant work experience, or experience in a previous practicum to draw from. These discourses are effects of power, usually when an opposing discourse is mobilized to resist another. 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. Haraway, D. (1988). which can be measured and known through research . The post-colonial critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogues . 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. When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. I would like to turn to two case studies which illustrate how discourse analysis was used by students. Introduction. Discourse theorists disagree on which parts of our world are real. A conflict occurred between Ronnis perspective and that of school personnel when Tara disclosed her pregnancy to Ronni. (1996). Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. "Introduction to Discourse in Sociology." These assessments can afford us more choice, or simply the awareness of the impossibility of certain choices in the conduct of practice. Teaching this class was a daunting prospect. Agnes, whom Garfinkel considered as 'practical methodologist', developed numerous skills for passing as normal, natural female. 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. Rossiter, A. second revised edition ed.). Social Work and Social Sciences Review, Vol. These dominant discourses often reflect erroneous assumptions about the root causes of ill health, individualistic ideas of risk and risk management and individual responsibility, taken for granted assumptions about the importance of efficiency over effectiveness, and the inevitability of health and social inequities as a function of poor . 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. knowledge is not simply a resource to deploy in practice. A Sociological Definition. Further, we interact within the constant presence of historical traumas in which we are all implicated. Indeed, many . Finally the strengths perspective will be . 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? 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. Despite Maxines best efforts, this troubled relationship ended in separation when the daughter moved in permanently with a relative. Critical case study: My experience with Tara .Unpublished manuscript, Toronto. 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