Many times our investigations pointed to opposing discourses - discourses that counteract each other. Our constructed location is often a painful one. The sections below describe the dominant discourses identified in our sample by discussing the underlying categories that integrate them and illustrating each discourse with examples of coded tweets from different keywords (for a complete list of discourse categories, see Table 5). Ronni worked with Tara from a critique of prevention and risk education strategies normally used in dealing with girls sexuality. Original language. When people wish to make social change, how we talk about people and their place in society cannot be left out of the process. 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. Discourse analysis accesses questions that help make social contradictions and ambivalence visible and it opens conceptual space regarding ones position within competing or dominant discourses. 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. 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. She has taught and researched at institutions including the University of California-Santa Barbara, Pomona College, and University of York. This is why it is critical reflection. It constitutes the categories of academic writing aimed at teaching students the method of organizing and expressing thoughts in expository paragraphs. Ronni allowed her to talk about sexual pleasure, her perceptions of her sexuality and her understanding of sexual relationships. Abstract. Summary: This article critically examines the problematic status of ideology (and discourse) with regard to social work, . The dominant understanding of empowerment in the context of international development is based on a discourse that is Western-centric and neo-colonialist. Take, for example, the relationship between mainstream media (an institution) and the anti-immigrant discourse that pervades U.S. society. 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. Dominant discourse demonstrates how reality has been socially constructed. Foucault was interested in power and social change. Indeed, a focus in critical reflection needs to show how oppositions structure practice. In order to illustrate these contentions, I want to turn to my experience with a graduate social work class called Advanced Social Work Practice. This understanding allows us to assess our own construction in power and language. In turn, such assessments act against the internalization of the contradictions played out in social work practice. asserts that discourses, in Fou- cault's work, are ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/discourse-definition-3026070. This intellectual interest can be found in the ways we re-experience value commitments through openness to the question at the heart of critical social work: What does social work have to do with justice? Crucially, it is underpinned by a critical . We began to think about the history of forced separation and forced disruption of families beginning with the importation of African slaves to the Caribbean. 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. Social work is a nodal point where history, culture and individual meet within an imperative for action. (2000). The . Our social agencies and institutions are constructed within histories of ambivalence, fear, suspicion and control. 22-40). 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. Marston, G. (2004), Social Policy and Discourse Analysis: Policy Change in Public Housing, Aldershot: Ashgate. 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. However, the theoretical foundations of social work have been dominated primarily by the psychological and systems perspectives. In discussions of immigration reform, the most frequently spoken word was illegal, followed by immigrants, country, border, illegals, and citizens.. She remembered the case with a sense of failure, and her recounting of the case was marked by a kind of unexplained sorrow. knowledge is not simply a resource to deploy in practice. 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. Geography. 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. 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. She moved out on her own, successfully pursued advanced education and was on the verge of achieving professional accreditation at the time of Maxines contact with her. While reflective practice held promise for liberating professions from misconceptions about the interrelationship between theory and practice, following Schons (1987) introduction of reflective practice, theorists began to identify the problem of incorporating critical analysis into reflective practice ((Brookfield, 1996; Fook, 1999; Mezirow, 1998). Understanding our perspectives as contingent enables us to understand our own complicated construction within a field of multiple stories giving rise to multiple perspectives. John J. Rodger: John J. Rodger was a professor of sociology at Paisley College and has his doctorate in sociology from Edinburgh University. 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. These behaviors and patterns of speech and writing reflect the ideologies of those who have the most power in the society. 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. which can be measured and known through research . 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. Spivak, G. (1990). Dominant discourses can be found in propaganda, cultural messages, and mass media. 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. 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. Its evident that discourse is the compilation of particular ideologies and beliefs concerning a certain bracket in the society. Is used to explain differences in outcomes, effort, or ability. (p. 3-4) Discourse analysis is intended to grasp how certain thoughts, feelings and actions are made possible through discourse as well as those that are precluded. We looked at how these conflicting discourses positioned Ronni, Tara and school personnel. 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. Scott, J. 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. 445-463). Unpublished Ph.D., University of Toronto, Toronto. 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? but by the demands of the dominant group within the . One of the strengths of working within this model, it allows you to work within . Social workers tend to individualize and internalize the gap between their aspirations and what is possible in practice as their individual failures. The case involved a single mother originally from the Caribbean. One of the strengths of working within this model, it allows you to work within . ), Working with Experience. Perhaps you are a teacher, youth group facilitator, student affairs personnel or manage a team that works with an . Michel Foucault. Teaching this class was a daunting prospect. 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. In considering this approach to the course, I had begun to feel like Alice in Wonderland, believing as I did, that such conventions produce ever greater disjunctions between practitioners experiences and orthodox social work education. Further, we interact within the constant presence of historical traumas in which we are all implicated. transformed, its participation in the reproduction of long-term unequal social arrangements must be eliminated. 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