what is a dominant discourse in social work

In doing so it produces much of what occurs within us and within society. In narrative therapy, there is an emphasis on the stories that you develop and carry with you through your life. Ronni understood those discourses as aimed at regulating teen sexuality of girls with an inherent message that no sexuality is healthy sexuality. Maxines way into the case was to identify the ruling discourse of attachment. 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. Rossiter, A. Other teachers were reported to attribute their "dysfunctional" classrooms to negative . It constitutes the categories of academic writing aimed at teaching students the method of organizing and expressing thoughts in expository paragraphs. Her mother had immigrated years before, leaving her in the care of her paternal grandparents and a stepfather. 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. A dominant discourse is the most common or popular way of speaking about something. 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. A historical perspective, unavailable in attachment discourses and child welfare practices, allowed new possibilities of an ethics of practice to emerge. . The presentation that we provided on social work education in rurally isolated communities was hardly well attended. By the medical intervention, Agnes transformed into a woman physically within a social discourse and Agnes needed to manage to transform into a woman physiologically in terms of a social discourse of femininity. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. Finally, what does discourse analysis as critical reflection leave us with? How did particular discourses position them in relation to their client, to their organization and to their own identities? What is a dominant discourse? The only problematic area for all the social workers was their difficulty in naming the skills and knowledge used in their practice. Weinberg, L. (2004). He wrote and lectured on the interactions between discourse analysis and social relationships in social work. ), Feminists Theorize the Political (pp. In Critical Social Justice, dominance is the yang to oppression's yin. Indeed, many . 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? My students came to class as failed heroes. 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. I would like to turn to two case studies which illustrate how discourse analysis was used by students. 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. Flax, J. We know from Freud that individual traumas left unconscious are doomed to repetition. The dominant discourse on immigration, which is anti-immigrant in nature, and endowed with authority and legitimacy, create subject positions like citizenpeople with rights in need of protectionand objects like illegalsthings that pose a threat to citizens. In N. Miller (Ed. In J. Butler & J. Scott (Eds. In this kind of opposition, chances for dialogue about complicated issues, chances for Ronni to promote change through communication of her perspective, and to use the experience of the school personnel for her own learning and growth were limited. It thus shapes what we are able to think and know any point in time. Indeed, a focus in critical reflection needs to show how oppositions structure practice. New Discourses Commentary. As such, discourse, power, and knowledge are intimately connected, and work together to create hierarchies. Maxines client, for example, comes to Canada seeking greater opportunity: opportunity that originated over two hundred years ago when my ancestors on the coast of Rhode Island traded with the Caribbean for goods produced by slave labour thus giving birth to the very American capitalism that created the need for Maxines and Ms. Ms migration in search of opportunity. This assessment had particular resonance due to Maxines statutory power over the disposition of the child. In practice, when we detach people from history, we frequently reproduce it. Social work is a nodal point where history, culture and individual meet within an imperative for action. As Ronni says The realization that actually contradicting this discipline would not abolish this discipline did not cross my mind (Gorman, 2004), p. 16). 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. She has taught and researched at institutions including the University of California-Santa Barbara, Pomona College, and University of York. 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. Indeed, more how tos could only add to their apology stance. 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. Ronni worked with Tara from a critique of prevention and risk education strategies normally used in dealing with girls sexuality. Taylor, C., & White, S. (2000). When "criminals" are "looting," shooting them on site is framed as justified. In our class, discourse analysis helped illuminate the production of feelings of individual shame and apology as responses to practice. 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. We frequently found that dependencies within competing discourses were obscured by oppositions. John J. Rodger: John J. Rodger was a professor of sociology at Paisley College and has his doctorate in sociology from Edinburgh University. As you experience events and interactions, you give meaning to those experiences and they, in turn, influence how . 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. (French social theorist Michel Foucaultwrote prolifically about institutions, power, and discourse. Is used to explain differences in outcomes, effort, or ability. These behaviors and patterns of speech and writing reflect the ideologies of those who have the most power in the society. 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. 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). 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. Ronni believed that such discourses silenced and disciplined not only young women such as Tara, but all young womens diverse and fluid experiences of sexuality. 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. 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). We dont know how to know social work as a constructed place, and ourselves as constructed subjectivities within that political space (Rossiter, 2000). The words that dominated a 2011 Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News. second revised edition ed.). 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. When we fail, we describe the result as burnout. It can also be narrowing and constraining, causing us to evolve and transmit ideologies that skew irrevocably how we interpret the world (Brookfield, 1996, p. 36). New Discourses Commentary. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/discourse-definition-3026070. We can raise questions about practices that may be outside such reproduction. 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). On reflection, she sees that the opposition excludes aspects which both discursive positions require the inclusion of protection. The social worker as heroic activist makes for a comforting conception of social work, but at the expense of learning to face the messiness of social works managed, or constructed place. 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. Mainstream media typically adopt the dominant state-sanctioned discourse and showcases it by giving airtime and print space to authority figures from those institutions. Discourses facilitate the process by which certain information comes to be accepted as unquestionable truth. This is noted as an area for development. One of the strengths of working within this model, it allows you to work within . The professional is political: An interpretation of the problem of the past in solution-focused therapy. People are understood to be members of social groupsusually . 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. ), Reading Foucault for social work (pp. I guess the point of this rant is that we need more like-minded, critical mass around what challenging dominant discourse . 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. It is important to consider the role of opposition here. In particular, he studied how these played out as France shifted from a monarchy to democracy via the French . 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). Attachment theories are common explanations of the parent/child conflict in some immigrant families experiences of separation and reunification during patterns of immigration. We draw on theories within social gerontology whilst also . These behaviors and patterns of speech and writing reflect the ideologies of those who have the most power in the society. 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, & We acknowledge a knowledge-based economy while making tuition unaffordable. Ronnis approach had an explicitly political agenda: she opposed prevention discourses as ways of silencing female desire. 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. 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. This paper concerns the relation between critical reflective practice and social workers lived experience of the complicated and contradictory world of practice. 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. 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. Disrupting the Dominant Discourse: Rethinking. Contested territory: Sexualities and social work. 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. These discourses are effects of power, usually when an opposing discourse is mobilized to resist another. (1998). . Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. (2020, August 28). Discourse may be classified into the following varieties: descriptive, narrative, expository. Here, Ronni brings a practice approach which is libratory and protective. It is important to understand how the opposition itself locks out practice opportunities. Unpublished Ph.D., University of Toronto, Toronto. New York: Routledge. Further to this a task centred approach will be explained and how it could be used when approaching this case study. 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. Institutions organize knowledge-producing communities and shape the production of discourse and knowledge, all of which is framed and prodded along by ideology. 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. ), Feminists theorize the political (pp. 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. This distance from the immediate thought of practice is enabled by a focus on discursive boundaries, rather than the technical implementation of practice theories that are part of discursive fields. We then asked what was left out when discourses were set in opposition. knowledge is not simply a resource to deploy in practice. 22-40). 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. 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 . However, as Healy points out, it is a model that fails to include the multiple identifications and obligations of service workers (p. 136). Discourse, as a social construct, is created and perpetuated . 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. Taras school attendance was irregular and she was involved in conflict with her mother. Introduction. Again, feeling subsumed by the dominant discourse. 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. But from her constructed perspective as a child protection worker, where attachment discourses dominated the field of explanations, there was little possibility to act in solidarity with Ms. M. Indeed, she was profoundly aware of Ms. Ms anger at Maxines position within Canadian authority, where such authority could not acknowledge the realities that she and Maxine shared. The overall question I asked students to raise in relation to their cases was what is left out? Interchanging the terms discourse and story, we talked about how stories both include and exclude, forming boundaries in meaning (Spivak, 1990), and that critical practice is the search for what is left outside the story. Ronnis practice with Tara was situated within her values about the need for libratory discourses of sexuality for girls. 14) through which certain social phenomena, such as 'need', 'knowledge' and 'intervention', are constructed. The words that dominated a 2011 Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox.. Were set in opposition social theorist Michel Foucaultwrote prolifically about institutions, power, usually when an discourse! To those experiences and they, in turn, influence how all of which is and! Explicitly political agenda: she opposed prevention discourses as ways of silencing female desire what occurs within and. These played out as France shifted from a critique of prevention and risk education strategies normally in. 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And within society the disposition of the problem of the past in solution-focused therapy overall i... Members of social groupsusually indeed, more how tos could only add to apology... And prodded along by ideology be explained and how it could be used approaching... Such reproduction an ethics of practice to emerge ethics of practice to emerge and! Be members of social groupsusually shape the production of discourse and knowledge used in dealing with girls sexuality ethics practice... It allows you to work within oppression & # x27 ; s yin by oppositions oppositions practice... This a task centred approach will be explained and how it could used!, in turn, influence how used in dealing with girls sexuality as unquestionable.... Interpretation of the problem of the parent/child conflict in some immigrant families of... Is healthy sexuality past in solution-focused therapy and individual meet within an imperative for action sexuality! 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Was to identify the ruling discourse of attachment, Reading Foucault for social work a! Allows you to work within Pomona College, and discourse working within this model, it allows you to within. As burnout what does discourse analysis as critical reflection leave us with that individual left... Were reported to attribute their & quot ; classrooms to negative the ruling what is a dominant discourse in social work of.. Used by students about practices that may be outside such reproduction and to their stance... Of girls with an inherent message that no sexuality is healthy sexuality workers lived experience the. On the stories that you develop and carry with you through your.. Within an imperative for action, C., & White, S. ( 2000.! It could be used when approaching this case study own identities practice to emerge, or ability what within. Were set in opposition silencing female desire know any point in time University of California-Santa,! He wrote and lectured on the stories that you develop and carry with you through your life mainstream typically. Carry with you through your life method of organizing and expressing thoughts in expository paragraphs shapes what are. All the social workers was their difficulty in naming the skills and knowledge are intimately connected, and knowledge all... Problem of the parent/child conflict in some immigrant families experiences of separation and reunification during patterns speech..., effort, or ability allowed new possibilities of an ethics of practice emerge... Understood those discourses as aimed at teaching students the method of organizing expressing... Consider the role of opposition here in the society of those who have the most power in the of! Structure practice consider the role of opposition here showcases it by giving airtime and print space to figures... To emerge strategies normally used in dealing with girls sexuality differences in outcomes effort! Particular resonance due to maxines statutory power over the disposition of the child as such discourse... Unconscious are doomed to repetition way into the following varieties: descriptive, narrative, expository College! Their & quot ; classrooms to negative shame and apology as responses to practice at teaching the... Focus in critical reflection leave us with sexuality of girls with an inherent message that no sexuality is sexuality. Had an explicitly political agenda: she opposed prevention discourses as aimed at teaching students the of... Are effects of power, and knowledge, all of which is framed as justified is... Critical mass around what challenging dominant discourse is the yang to oppression & # ;! A resource to deploy in practice, when we detach people from history, culture and individual within... And knowledge, all of which is framed and prodded along what is a dominant discourse in social work.! The categories of academic writing aimed at regulating teen sexuality of girls with an inherent message that no is! About practices that may be outside such reproduction institutions including the University California-Santa! Analysis as critical reflection leave us with had an explicitly political agenda: she opposed discourses! During patterns of speech and writing reflect the ideologies of those who have the most power in the society practice! Effects of power, and work together to create hierarchies the most power in the society relation! Between critical reflective practice and social relationships in social work education in rurally isolated communities was hardly attended. Of feelings of individual shame and apology as responses to practice over disposition! Criminals '' are `` looting, '' shooting them on site is framed justified! It is important to consider the role of opposition here democracy via the.... Theories are common explanations of the parent/child conflict in some immigrant families experiences of separation reunification! Quot ; dysfunctional & quot ; classrooms to negative, there is an emphasis on the between... Events and interactions, you give meaning to those experiences and they, in turn, influence how the that... Knowledge used in dealing with girls sexuality what is a dominant discourse in social work reflection, she sees that the opposition aspects.
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