The . 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. Perhaps you are a teacher, youth group facilitator, student affairs personnel or manage a team that works with an . . Discourse theorists disagree on which parts of our world are real. 1 Discourse is, thus, a way of organising knowledge that . asserts that discourses, in Fou- cault's work, are ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations. Lets take a closer look at the relationships between institutions and discourse. In particular she called for educators to consider alliance with youth based on respect for youths own construction of their realities. In this case, those discourses were set up with the prevention and risk discourse as repressive and the validation of sexuality discourse as progressive and libratory for young women. Here, Ronni brings a practice approach which is libratory and protective. Students were asked to identify the discourses that informed their case studies. Carolyn Taylor and Susan White make a distinction between reflection and reflexivity where the latter adds a critical dimension by calling taken-for-granted assumptions into questions (Taylor & White, 2000). This paper concerns the relation between critical reflective practice and social workers lived experience of the complicated and contradictory world of practice. We can ask how this construction is related to our commitments and values. Ronni allowed her to talk about sexual pleasure, her perceptions of her sexuality and her understanding of sexual relationships. We might even think of a discourse as a worldview in action. These theories contain values that are supposed to dovetail with practice. Foucault adopted the term 'discourse' to denote a historically contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning. Historical trauma repeats itself in the small micro interactions of practice. (2001). We dont know how to know social work as a constructed place, and ourselves as constructed subjectivities within that political space (Rossiter, 2000). The professional is political: An interpretation of the problem of the past in solution-focused therapy. These discourses are effects of power, usually when an opposing discourse is mobilized to resist another. The hold of possessive individualism in the helping professions means that the target of practice is the individual, community, or family in the present . Teaching this class was a daunting prospect. This approach allows people to subtly shape social reality base on the dominant discourses. She did so by allowing Tara to talk openly and honestly about her sexuality, her feelings about school and family. 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. Discourse is a coherently-arranged, serious and systematic treatment of a topic in spoken or written language. 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. 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. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/discourse-definition-3026070. The existing social work practice in the mental health field creates its boundaries within medical model and neglects a social work practice which explores critical perspective (Morley, 2003). The data analysed are social media posts and materials created to challenge and reject GBV and the way it is understood and portrayed in popular, dominant discourse. 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. 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. Understanding our constructed place in social work depends on identifying how language creates templates of shared understandings. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 7(2), 23-41. 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? 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. They also positioned Ronni in relations of opposition to school personnel. In our class, discourse analysis helped illuminate the production of feelings of individual shame and apology as responses to practice. 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. We worked to identify oppositions between competing discourses. . 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. Discourse is understood as a way of perceiving, framing, and viewing the world. 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). Discourses facilitate the process by which certain information comes to be accepted as unquestionable truth. On reflection, she sees that the opposition excludes aspects which both discursive positions require the inclusion of protection. On Critical Reflection. We frequently found that dependencies within competing discourses were obscured by oppositions. 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. My students came to class as failed heroes. Lastly, dominant and nondominant fall under a secondary Discourse. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599. The press of globalization means that more than ever, we interact with people whose historical formation is different from ours. The construction of oppositions helped students identify what they might have left out of their thinking about the cases. 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. 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. Concepts like looting and rioting have been used in mainstream media coverage of the uprising that followed the police killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. Once discourses were identified, students could discover how those discourses created subject positions for themselves, their clients and others involved in the case. Stamp, M. (2004). 2) Such recognition allows us to examine practice for the ways that history reproduces itself in our daily actions and reactions. In doing so, we increase our choices or at least, our awareness regarding how we participate in the creation of culture. as doctors or patients), and it is these social effects of discourse that are focused on in discourse analysis. Foucault was interested in power and social change. . The power of discourse lies in its ability to provide legitimacy for certain kinds of knowledge while undermining others; and, in its ability to create subject positions, and, to turn people into objects that that can be controlled. Discourse, as a social construct, is created and perpetuated . Spivak, G. (1990). Ronnis practice with Tara was situated within her values about the need for libratory discourses of sexuality for girls. 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. 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. 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, & 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. Maxine Stamp (Stamp, 2004) wrote about a case she encountered when she worked in a child protection agency. 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. These students either had significant work experience, or experience in a previous practicum to draw from. Mezirow, J. Introduction to Discourse in Sociology. The discourse, which spoke to girls sexuality, was born as political resistance to the heterosexist and patriarchal norms of the prevention efforts. 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. The biomedical discourse is one of the most influential discourses in the health care profession today (Healy, p. 20). I was also worried that students coming to class hoping to refine their grasp of narrative therapy, brief therapy, solution-focused therapy or cognitive behavioural therapy, all within the context of an anti-oppressive stance, would be very disappointed by the substitution of esoteric critical ethics for advanced practice. 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. These assessments can afford us more choice, or simply the awareness of the impossibility of certain choices in the conduct of practice. The words that dominated a 2011 Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News. 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. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and historian interested in the construction of knowledge and power through discourse. 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. 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. Rossiter, A. 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 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. The Scott, J. Dr. Nicki Lisa Cole is a sociologist. Dominant culture is a group whose members hold more power relative to other members in society. Once these dependencies were uncovered, alternatives to opposition emerged. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Corporation. Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. (2020, August 28). A dominant discourse is the most common or popular way of speaking about something. 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? 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. As such, discourse is imbued with attitudes and . Its evident that discourse is the compilation of particular ideologies and beliefs concerning a certain bracket in the society. London: Routledge. which can be measured and known through research . Conflicts between discursive fields can position practitioners in, for example, good/bad or radical/conservative kinds of splits that freeze subject positions, thus prefiguring relationships. Principles of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversities are central to social work. We decry racism and declare our allegiance to anti-oppressive practice while working in primarily white agencies. Truth and method (J. W. a. D. G. Marshall, Trans. The materials counter the dominant discourse on GBV, whereby violence against woman is normalised through the ways in which the message is framed, and the language used, as . Openness to questions about the constitution of practice iscritical practice. One of the advantages of identifying discourses-in-use in practice is that we gain access to how we are positioned within discourses. 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. New Discourses Commentary. ), Transforming social work practice: Postmodern critical perspectives. It is a story that cannot be told within the reigning discourse of attachment. The social reality that creates cultural binaries and unfairness. Here, I want to gather strands of the previous discussion. Discourses which augment the power of elites are called dominant or official discourses by poststructuralists. 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. What is a dominant discourse? In N. Miller (Ed. One of the strengths of working within this model, it allows you to work within . Social work is a nodal point where history, culture and individual meet within an imperative for action. Gorman, R. (2004). The case involved Ms. M, a single mother of two teenage daughters. 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. 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 live with the complexity of their ambivalently constructed place. 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. Ms. M had immigrated to Canada when she was an adolescent. New York: Routledge. 1 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. This is noted as an area for development. John J. Rodger: John J. Rodger was a professor of sociology at Paisley College and has his doctorate in sociology from Edinburgh University. Understanding our perspectives as contingent enables us to understand our own complicated construction within a field of multiple stories giving rise to multiple perspectives. Menstrual management is recognized as a critical issue for young people internationally. An ideology is defined as a system of beliefs and values that not only seek to describe the world but also to transform it. Discourse analysis is therefore a purely practical remedy of identifying silences and contradictions so that our practice better lends itself to choices based on our values and our aspirations for culture. Critical Social Work, 2(1). He wrote and lectured on the interactions between discourse analysis and social relationships in social work. Revolutions in how mental health problems are conceptualised have had a substantial impact on the work of mental health nurses. however, conflicted with the dominant Discourses of others in the school. 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. Abstract. Maxine made extraordinary efforts to help Ms. M and her daughter, but to no avail, because her constructed participation in this reproduction process was the root of her pain. We began to think about the ways slavery is replicated in different incarnations following the end of slavery. Social workers tend to individualize and internalize the gap between their aspirations and what is possible in practice as their individual failures. Indeed, this figure has become the normative definition of the truly committed social worker. London: Sage. When we hear words like this, concepts charged full of meaning, we deduce things about the people involved--that they are lawless, crazed, dangerous, and violent. These elements helped students writing cases from memories saturated with unease about their own performance to shift from what I did to how the case was constructed, and how their feelings arose from the complicated constructions of their practice within particular locations and time. Maxinestamp358@hotmail.com. Thus, I have found myself on the terrain of a kind of critical ethics that views practice theories as stories about the cultural ideals of practice, and that treats practitioners experiences as stories that can teach us about the conduct of practice in relation to such ideals. When oppositions are in place, what boundaries are erected? In doing so it produces much of what occurs within us and within society. Such templates are the discourses through which particular practices are made possible. Ronni_Gorman@yahoo.ca. Discourse refers to how we think and communicate about people, things, the social organization of society, and the relationships among and between all three. Peer specialists with incarceration histories constructed new identities through their training and peer work by valuing experiential knowledge. This paper explores dominant discourses underpinning the social worker visit to children and families and their impact on their purpose, content and focus. A 13-yr old girl, Tara, was referred to Ronni Gorman for counseling. We remove children from disadvantaged families by targeting mothering skills. 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. 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. Thus, Ronni championed Tara while shielding her from the harm of school personnel. Although ageism is prevalent in many forms, one significant manifestation is in and through common discourse. We struggled to understand how subject positions were created by opposing discourses, and how such oppositions excluded consideration of protection with respect to sexual vulnerability. In J. Fook (Ed. Practitioners, trapped by the notion that theories can be directly implemented by the adequate practitioner, frequently feel personally responsible for limitations on their practice. These wordsreflect and reproduce very particular values, ideas, and beliefs about immigrants and U.S. citizensideas about rights, resources, and belonging. Marston, G. (2004), Social Policy and Discourse Analysis: Policy Change in Public Housing, Aldershot: Ashgate. For example, in Canada, the dominant discourse that capitalism capitalism is the best economic system can be found in media . What is discourse in social work? Non Dominant Discourses are what " brings solidarity with a particular social network ". 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