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. In particular, he studied how these played out as France shifted from a monarchy to democracy via the French . You: Hmm, that's . 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. Her mother had immigrated years before, leaving her in the care of her paternal grandparents and a stepfather. Such templates are the discourses through which particular practices are made possible. Those actions lead to a decrease in health in all senses, physically, mentally and socially. He notes that discourse is distinctly material in effect, producing what he calls 'practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak'. ), Reading Foucault for social work (pp. Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. "Introduction to Discourse in Sociology." Once these dependencies were uncovered, alternatives to opposition emerged. With the achievement of this necessary distance Ronni was able to formulate new possibilities for practice. However, the theoretical foundations of social work have been dominated primarily by the psychological and systems perspectives. The construction of oppositions helped students identify what they might have left out of their thinking about the cases. Deconstructing dominant discourse in therapy and counseling . Maxine considered how she was positioned both by discourses of professionalism and by the attachment discourses used to explain Ms. M. As a professional with statutory power, Maxine was given Caribbean family cases due to her insider status. 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. The community discourse is consistent with the social work value base in emphasising social justice, community empowerment and the rights of marginalised groups (Ife, 2008). 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. Work in social psychology has shown that the stereotype of blacks as violent and criminal is alive and well in American society (Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & (Gee 8). These students either had significant work experience, or experience in a previous practicum to draw from. 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. 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 . 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. 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. 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 . Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. "Introduction to Discourse in Sociology." Foucault was interested in power and social change. 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. The only problematic area for all the social workers was their difficulty in naming the skills and knowledge used in their practice. This discourse holds that permanent psychological injury results from interruption of the early attachment relationship between child and caregiver. The hold of possessive individualism in the helping professions means that the target of practice is the individual, community, or family in the present . Were asked to help but not make people dependent. People with mental illnesses are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, and discourses concerning the medical model, criminalization, and criminality dominate the intervention . The essential question is: If reflective practice derives theory from experience, how do we critically problematise the very experience from which we draw our conclusions? She has taught and researched at institutions including the University of California-Santa Barbara, Pomona College, and University of York. 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. In order to achieve a critical social work practice a practice capable of grasping towards an ethics of practice - we needed to raise questions about the construction of experience in the classs case studies. Practising reflectivity in health and welfare: Making knowledge . 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. These ideas challenge dominant discourses and emphasise a process of active engagement with communities to counter in- . The words that dominated a 2011 Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News. They also positioned Ronni in relations of opposition to school personnel. Goodreads. Gorman, R. (2004). When "criminals" are "looting," shooting them on site is framed as justified. 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. By providing social workers with a greater understanding of the history, epistemology, and key assumptions, this article aims to promote critical awareness and critical reflection on how the biomedical paradigm may be influencing health care environments. London: Routledge. 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. 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. Critical social work helps people to understand the dominant ideology discourse and relocate subjectively in to that discourse. (1998). My students came to class as failed heroes. In J. Butler & J. Scott (Eds. 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. No wonder we cling to the fantasy of the smooth trajectory of practice. 14) through which certain social phenomena, such as 'need', 'knowledge' and 'intervention', are constructed. 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. Most social workers take up the profession because of personal ideals. We can raise questions about practices that may be outside such reproduction. Social work practices: Contemporary perspectives on change. The case involved Ms. M, a single mother of two teenage daughters. 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. Rossiter, A. Hegemony is a concept developed by Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci that understands dominant groups in society to have the power to impose its own knowledge and values onto marginalized groups. It aims to understand how language is used in real life situations. London: Sage. 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? 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. In narrative therapy, there is an emphasis on the stories that you develop and carry with you through your life. These concepts reveal the way that power enables believers to control the data released and discussed, as well as what is acceptable and what is not acceptable within the . Maxine was devastated at her inability to put the relationship between mother and daughter to rights. The concepts of discourse, power and governmentality have become important in understanding social processes. She engaged in low level self-mutilation and in sexual activity. https://www.thoughtco.com/discourse-definition-3026070 (accessed March 2, 2023). Mainstream media typically adopt the dominant state-sanctioned discourse and showcases it by giving airtime and print space to authority figures from those institutions. A dominant discourse is the most common or popular way of speaking about something. Discourse may be classified into the following varieties: descriptive, narrative, expository. It thus shapes what we are able to think and know any point in time. 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 discourses arguably create dominant understandings and representations, fairytales of what an "ideal" childhood should and can be. (2000). 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. Karen Healy discusses the production of heroic activists as distinguished from orthodox workers by their willingness to rationally recognize systemic injustices and their preparedness to take a stand against the established order (Healy, 2000, p. 135). Many times our investigations pointed to opposing discourses - discourses that counteract each other. As such, discourse is imbued with attitudes and . . 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. 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. In A. Chambon & A. Irving & L. Epstein (Eds. We remove children from disadvantaged families by targeting mothering skills. 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). New York: Routledge. Critical reflectivity in education and 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. Ronni_Gorman@yahoo.ca. If ideology is a worldview, discourse is how we organize and express that worldview in thought and language. 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. ), and it may be spoken in . as "deviant," in opposition to a dominant desire for adaptation. The post-colonial critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogues . Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/discourse-definition-3026070. 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. 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. Menstrual management is recognized as a critical issue for young people internationally. 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. 3, p. 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. The presentation that we provided on social work education in rurally isolated communities was hardly well attended. 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. 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. Maxine pointed out, for example, that Caribbean women were previously allowed to immigrate to Canada to take up positions as domestic servants but were expressly forbidden to bring their children. the dominant discourse. 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. Although ageism is prevalent in many forms, one significant manifestation is in and through common discourse. Class, race, culture, history are excluded as the focus on the dyad is retained as an explanation for family breakdown. The professional is political: An interpretation of the problem of the past in solution-focused therapy. 131-155). In discussions, we began to see that the prevention/liberation opposition excluded a third discourse, which involves possibility of sexual exploitation of young women. What Is Political Socialization? 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. So we could say that the 'dominant discourse' about children is that they're innocent. We worked to identify oppositions between competing discourses. Within this anti-immigrant discourse,illegals and immigrants are juxtaposed against citizens, each working to define the other through their opposition. We can also assess how discourses position us in relation to other professionals and to clients. Spivak, G. (1990). 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. Social workers were critiqued as being a part of the problem by choosing to emphasize casework as a model of practice, an approach . Despite Maxines best efforts, this troubled relationship ended in separation when the daughter moved in permanently with a relative. Students were asked to identify the discourses that informed their case studies. Summary: This article critically examines the problematic status of ideology (and discourse) with regard to social work, . Discourse theorists disagree on which parts of our world are real. Ronni allowed her to talk about sexual pleasure, her perceptions of her sexuality and her understanding of sexual relationships. Lets take a closer look at the relationships between institutions and discourse. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Corporation. Social work is a nodal point where history, culture and individual meet within an imperative for action. While she understands that such an approach is constructed a fiction it is a construction she chooses to empower because it is grounded in her social justice aspirations. 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. 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. Social Work and Social Sciences Review, Vol. These behaviors and patterns of speech and writing reflect the ideologies of those who have the most power in the society. (1992). This is noted as an area for development. These discourses are effects of power, usually when an opposing discourse is mobilized to resist another. What exactly does discourse "construct"? 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 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. 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). Institutions organize knowledge-producing communities and shape the production of discourse and knowledge, all of which is framed and prodded along by ideology. Sociologists see discourse as embedded in and emerging out of relations of power because those in control of institutionslike media, politics, law, medicine, and educationcontrol its formation. She had two teen-aged daughters who had been left in the country of origin as very young children while Ms. M established herself in Canada. I was at once horrified by the level of individual self-recrimination in the cases, and inspired by the deep levels of commitment, thought and reflection evidenced by these students. One of the advantages of identifying discourses-in-use in practice is that we gain access to how we are positioned within discourses. as doctors or patients), and it is these social effects of discourse that are focused on in discourse analysis. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and historian interested in the construction of knowledge and power through discourse. 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