Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
WEEK 7 READING (1) - Post Modern Approaches to Practice (DECONSTRUCTION: …
WEEK 7 READING (1) - Post Modern Approaches to Practice
POST-MODERNISM:
Concerned with theories of society, culture and history.
POST-STRUCTURALISM:
Focused on the influence of language, on power knowledge and identity.
Argues that the relationship between language and the objects to which it refers is not fixed but shaped by the different meanings that discourses make available.
Eg. the concept of need, the role of social workers.
Language is a key political struggle, as discourse shapes how core concepts such as 'needs' and 'rights' are understood within any context.
This is an issue for modern social work practice, because different discourses and theories for practice offer varying and sometimes conflicting ways of understanding and responding to client 'needs'.
Postmodernism is often used to describe the range of 'post' theories, but there are differences among them.
There are three key post theories
Postmodernism
Poststructuralism
Postcolonialism
KEY CONCEPTS IN THESE THEORIES:
Discourse
Subjectivity
Power
Deconstruction
CONTEMPORARY THEORIES FOR SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE:
Systems theories
Problem-solving theories
Strength and solution-focused theories
Modern critical social work theories
Postmodern social work theories
POST-COLONIALISM:
Postcolonial approaches are used to analyse how the colonial legacy shapes issues such as migration, race, gender, slavery and the representation of 'others'.
Devoted to revisiting, remembering and crucially interrogating the colonial past.
It commits itself to a complex project of historical and psychological recovery
POSSIBLE BENEFITS OF POST-MODERN THEORIES:
They help activists to destabilise power relations
Allow for enhanced flexibility and responsiveness in the way they approach critical analysis and action
Helps us advocate for the reevaluation of aspects of social work practice (eg policies, managerial practices)
Postcolonial perspectives encourage critical analysis of how the colonial legacy is sustained in modern social work practice.
DISCOURSE:
The language practices through which knowledge, truth, our sense of selves and social relations are constructed...
In other words, it's the language practices through which we understand 'reality' and act on it.
It constructs knowledge in practice (particularly what counts as true/sayable and what is considered false/unsayable.
It has real or material effects, in that they construct our understandings of key entities such as 'client need' and 'social work practice'.
HOW IT AFFECTS SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE:
It shapes the experience of service users and the responses from social workers.
It shapes our understandings of the rights, responsibilities, experiences of and relationships between service users and service workers.
EG. 'child abuse' is associated with the construction of parents as abusers rather than people in need and deserving of state support.
SUBJECTIVITY:
Our sense of selves (identity)
Rejects the idea that identity is fixed, instead, our identities are shaped by discourse and thus varies from context to context.
Our bodily differences, associated with age, height, skin colour, ethnicity and gender complicate one's identity thus one's capacity to exercise professional power.
A person's subjectivities affect how the person sees themself, as well as how others see them and the kinds of power and authority the person is able to exercise.
Our subjectivities can be competing, eg. A child abuser could also be seen as a loving father and a victim of AOD. (Social workers acknowledge the multiple competing subjectivities of people)
EG. A social worker in child protection may be powerful in their role within society, but they might also be powerless and vulnerable due to their low status within the bureaucracy, age, gender and non parenting status.
POWER:
Poststructuralist's see power as an ever-present and productive feature of social relations, where as modern, anti-oppressive theories focus on minimising power differences.
Poststructuralist's contest that power is a product of discourse rather than something attached to specific identities such as 'male' or 'professional'.
RULES OF POWER: Foucault
1. Power is exercised rather than possessed
It is exercised from specific social locations and by specific people.
A poststructural perspective can contribute to empowering practice, by encouraging workers to recognise and support service users; capacities to exercise power (rather than focus on their relative powerlessness from a structural perspective).
2. Power is not primarily repressive, but productive
Argues that people submit to power because they gain something from it.
A focus on power as oppressive ignores the positive dimensions of power.
It can induce pleasure, forms of knowledge and produce things, it's not just a negative force.
3. Power is analysed as coming from the bottom up
We should analyse power from the local to the structural, rather than the other way around.
Recognises that power is also produced from the micro-level not just the macro
DECONSTRUCTION:
The process of identifying and undermining oppositions through which discourses represent things such as knowledge, identity and other social phenomena.
Oppositions found in social work discourse:
Normal/abnormal
True/false
Powerful/powerless
Work/service user
Middle class/working class
Male/female
Expert/layperson
Able bodied/disabled
Straight/gay or lesbian
These oppositions create a hierarchy between the two opposed terms and hide the differences within and between each of them.
Powerful and powerless are at opposite ends of a continuum and deconstruction allows us to explore the different positions in between the two.
NARRATIVE THERAPY: A Postmodern Practice Approach
Focuses on the idea that the narratives we, and others, construct about us actively shape our experiences, our sense of selves and our life options.
According to this approach, service users' lives are constrained by the harmful narratives they and others have generated about them... Often, these narratives have been produced in order to 'diagnose' and ultimately 'help' the person, but the effect is to imprison the person in a narrative that damages and constrains them.
Due to the harm these narratives can and do cause, they should be the site of intervention.
Workers sometimes seek to assist communities to realise new narratives.
KEY PRINCIPLES OF THE NARRATIVE APPROACH:
1. Focus on the narratives that shape service users' lives:
Seek to challenge the harmful narratives that represent the service user in a negative and pathological frame.
Seek to recognise and construct alternative narratives that recognise and honour the person's capabilities (eg. their capacity to take responsibility for violence).
Requires the worker to adopt a curious and other position towards the service user, rather than a truth-seeking position.
In the initial engagement, explore with the client how they came to be 'recruited' into the dominant and harmful narrative about themselves.
2. Seperate the person from the problem:
A way to do this is through externalising the conversation. eg. renaming an uncontrollable anger as 'the dragon'.
Acknowledge times when the client has effectively resisted the problem.
3. Reconstruct the Dominant Story of the Self:
Reconstruct the narrative that emphasises pathology, to one that highlights and supports the client's capacities.
You don't need to deny the existence of a mental illness or violent behaviour, you just need to illuminate and build the client's capacity to live a life of their choosing.
Eg. getting a child abuser to take responsibility for their action and commending them on times when they have restrained from acting violently.
4. Co-constructing narratives through and with community:
It's important to build communities that support affirming narratives of the self and community.
When community members are encouraged to articulate and deconstruct their community's experiences of trauma, they can find safe places in which to stand in the territory of memory. This provides them with platforms for speaking of what hasn't been spoken about, for putting into more significant expression their experiences of trauma
Eg. You could invite a client's closest supporters to a ceremony with a bonfire, to destroy an object that represented the man's violence.
KEY POINTS:
Beginning with an understanding that the oppressed are encouraged to accept their oppressed status via dominant ideologies that present the current social order as ‘just’
Acknowledgement that language does more than just reflect/describe, it actually constructs reality
Use of family/groups/listening teams
Find their stories of resistance – the unique outcomes
displace negative images with affirming identities and pride (reconstructing)
LIMITATIONS OF POST THEORIES FOR SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE:
The language practises that shape a client's situation should not distract us from the pressing material needs of their situation or recognition of the broader contexts of oppression.
???
BENEFITS OF POST THEORIES FOR SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE:
Encourages workers to recognise and explore the range of perspectives about the problem facing the service user (eg. the multiple narratives shaping a client's situation)
Allows workers to recognise that there are multiple subjectivities/identities of a person.
Recognises that we must consider how the discourses and narratives through which the client and their problems are defined also shape the options available to them.
Narrative strategies can be used to empower and energise service users, by separating them from the perceived problem.