what is a dominant discourse in social work

What is discourse in social work? Most social workers take up the profession because of personal ideals. I would like to turn to two case studies which illustrate how discourse analysis was used by students. Ronni aligned herself politically with resistance to heterosexism and patriarchy. 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. 131-155). It has proved difficult to reconcile conventional theories of practice with a vision of social work as social justice work. Marston, G. (2004), Social Policy and Discourse Analysis: Policy Change in Public Housing, Aldershot: Ashgate. These ideas challenge dominant discourses and emphasise a process of active engagement with communities to counter in- . Lastly, dominant and nondominant fall under a secondary Discourse. In discussions, we began to see that the prevention/liberation opposition excluded a third discourse, which involves possibility of sexual exploitation of young women. To challenge this discourse, we need to look at what it means to be poor in today's society. . When Maxine regards Ms. M. through the attachment lens, her own experiences as a Caribbean woman, her history, and her solidarity with other Caribbean women is excluded. Here, Ronni brings a practice approach which is libratory and protective. Critical Social Work, 2(1). In N. Miller (Ed. In J. Butler & J. Scott (Eds. Dominant discourses can be found in propaganda, cultural messages, and mass media. . With the achievement of this necessary distance Ronni was able to formulate new possibilities for practice. 1. We might even think of a discourse as a worldview in action. Critical reflectivity in education and practice. I argue that understanding this process of production is a way of doing ethics which reduces, or at least acknowledges the unintended, often subliminal consequences of practice that flow from social ambivalence which constructs social workers and service recipients in the conduct of practice. . Weinberg, L. (2004). 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. Our constructed location is often a painful one. Haraway, D. (1988). Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/discourse-definition-3026070. 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. 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). New York: Routledge. Gadamer, H.-G. (1992). One of the strengths of working within this model, it allows you to work within . The biomedical discourse is one of the most influential discourses in the health care profession today (Healy, p. 20). This is because Critical Social Justice separates the world into these two diametrically opposing positions with respect to systemic power, which is its central object of interest. 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. 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. Discourse theorists disagree on which parts of our world are real. Again, feeling subsumed by the dominant discourse. which can be measured and known through research . Further, we interact within the constant presence of historical traumas in which we are all implicated. Peer specialists with incarceration histories constructed new identities through their training and peer work by valuing experiential knowledge. In doing so it produces much of what occurs within us and within society. 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? A discourse is a system of words, actions, rules, and beliefs that share common values. The case involved Ms. M, a single mother of two teenage daughters. 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. . 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. 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. 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. as doctors or patients), and it is these social effects of discourse that are focused on in discourse analysis. The words that dominated a 2011 Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News. 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. I draw on his theories in this discussion). Some discourses come to dominate the mainstream (dominant discourses), and are considered truthful, normal, and right, while others are marginalized and stigmatized, and considered wrong, extreme, and even dangerous. Critical discourse analysis (or discourse analysis) is a research method for studying written or spoken language in relation to its social context. 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). What Is Political Socialization? Within this anti-immigrant discourse,illegals and immigrants are juxtaposed against citizens, each working to define the other through their opposition. Attachment theories are common explanations of the parent/child conflict in some immigrant families experiences of separation and reunification during patterns of immigration. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and historian interested in the construction of knowledge and power through discourse. 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. Particular discourses sustain particular worldviews. Such critical analysis allows us to contemplate a major question at the heart of her practice: How can historical consciousness, left out of psychological discourses, contribute to forming relations of solidarity with our clients, thus enabling practice better aligned with justice? Historical trauma repeats itself in the small micro interactions of practice. We want to use our work as a contribution, as something of value to the world. as "deviant," in opposition to a dominant desire for adaptation. When I read the case studies, I was taken aback to find that students chose to write about stories of pain and distress in their practice contexts. Once discourses were identified, students could discover how those discourses created subject positions for themselves, their clients and others involved in the case. These assessments can afford us more choice, or simply the awareness of the impossibility of certain choices in the conduct of practice. We needed instead, a process of understanding the construction of pain, apology and failure in social work practice - a process that allowed them to be the heroes they were by virtue of their willingness to think, self-reflect, and ultimately, be brave enough to uphold the primacy of question over answer while rejecting paralysis. Many times our investigations pointed to opposing discourses - discourses that counteract each other. Discourse typically emerges out of social institutions like media and politics (among others), and by virtue of giving structure and order to language and . Yet hegemonic discourses are never all-dominant but rather remain partial and open to challenge in the face of oppositional discourses (Williams 1 977: 113; Bonilla-Silva 201 3:9). 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. (2001). 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? As Cannella ( 1997 ) and many others have discussed, these discourses construct childhood as a universal stage of life, where the process of childhood is through the development of a predetermined and . These discourses are effects of power, usually when an opposing discourse is mobilized to resist another. 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. ), Feminists Theorize the Political (pp. Ronnis practice with Tara was situated within her values about the need for libratory discourses of sexuality for girls. Further to this a task centred approach will be explained and how it could be used when approaching this case study. Adult Education Quarterly, 48 (3), 185-198. Discourses which augment the power of elites are called dominant or official discourses by poststructuralists. Understanding our constructed place in social work depends on identifying how language creates templates of shared understandings. Dominant discourse demonstrates how reality has been socially constructed. . 'Oh' prepares the hearer for a surprising or just-remembered item, and 'but' indicates that sentence to follow is in opposition to the one before. 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. 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. Many now use them as a frame of analysis for their research. 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. Other teachers were reported to attribute their "dysfunctional" classrooms to negative . Fook, J. Original language. 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. Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. "Introduction to Discourse in Sociology." We can ask how this construction is related to our commitments and values. Flax, J. Practitioners, trapped by the notion that theories can be directly implemented by the adequate practitioner, frequently feel personally responsible for limitations on their practice. (1996). transformed, its participation in the reproduction of long-term unequal social arrangements must be eliminated. We separate those who deserve help from those who dont while believing in fair redistribution of resources. 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. (1999). Identifying this discourse enabled Maxine to begin to assess her position within the discourse: She was positioned as a professional whose responsibility was to act as a critic of the mother/child attachment failure. Dominant culture is a group whose members hold more power relative to other members in society. Thus, the heroic activist model dooms most social workers to an ignominious less than activist status. 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. It is important to consider the role of opposition here. The strength of dominant discourses lies in their ability to shut out other options or opinions to the extent that thinking . These students either had significant work experience, or experience in a previous practicum to draw from. Indeed, this figure has become the normative definition of the truly committed social worker. A conflict occurred between Ronnis perspective and that of school personnel when Tara disclosed her pregnancy to Ronni. How did particular discourses position them in relation to their client, to their organization and to their own identities? Ronni, on the other hand, assessed her position in relation to two discourses: the prevention discourse and the discourse that acknowledged girls sexuality. 14) through which certain social phenomena, such as 'need', 'knowledge' and 'intervention', are constructed. A historical perspective, unavailable in attachment discourses and child welfare practices, allowed new possibilities of an ethics of practice to emerge. 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. Pregnant with possibility: Reducing ethical trespasses in social work practice with young single mothers. This paper concerns the relation between critical reflective practice and social workers lived experience of the complicated and contradictory world of practice. Innocence lost and suspicion found: Do we educate for or against social work? 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. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 70(2), 150-161. 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. 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. And how it could be used when approaching this case study, the organization Maxines. Peer specialists with incarceration histories constructed new identities through their training and peer by... 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Up the profession because of personal ideals be found in propaganda, cultural messages, and that... Of long-term unequal social arrangements must be eliminated and mass media marston, G. ( 2004 ), and that... The extent that thinking teenage daughters two case studies which illustrate how discourse analysis: Policy Change in Public,! Who deserve help from those who dont while believing in fair redistribution of resources many now them... To attribute their & quot ; deviant, & quot ; in opposition to a dominant desire adaptation... How it could be used when approaching this case study social work depends on identifying how language creates of!

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