Urban Indian Child Welfare as an Emancipatory Project--Conclusion

Urban Indian Child Welfare as an Emancipatory Project--Part II

Urban Indian Child Welfare as an Emancipatory Project--Part I

Critical Social Work (Fook, 2002)

• Critical deconstruction and reconstruction—unsettle dominant discourses and create structures for new discourses to work
• Empowerment—deconstruct and reconstruct power relations
• Problem conceptualization and assessment—traditionally reflects dominant discourses of powerful groups; reframe concepts and language
• Narrative reconstruction—uncover and challenge unhelpful assumptions
• Contextual practices—grounding action in local, immediate context, but transcending everyday practice
• On-going learning—working critically in uncertainty
  
  from Fook, J. 2002. Social work: Critical theory and practice. London: Sage.

Principles of critical social work practice and theory
(June Allan, 2003)

• a commitment to the transformation of processes and structures that perpetuate domination and exploitation
• a commitment to working alongside oppressed and marginalized populations
• an orientation towards emancipatory personal and social change, social justice and social equality
• a dialogical relationship between social workers and the people with, or on behalf of whom, the work

from Allan, J., Pease, B. & Briskman, L. (2003). Critical social work: An introduction to theories and practices. Crows Nest NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin.

Anti-oppressive social work practice principles (Karen Healy, 2005)

• critical reflection on self in practice—demands we reflect on ways our own biographies shape our practice relationships
• critical assessment of service users’ experiences of oppression—assess how personal, cultural and structural processes shape the problems service users present to social service agencies
• empowering service users—seek to overcome the cultural, institutional and structural, as well as personal, obstacles to clients taking greater control of their lives
• working in partnership—service users should be included as far as possible as fellow citizens in the decision-making processes which affect their lives
• minimal intervention—social services work is a contradictory activity in which social care dimensions are always intertwined with social control; need to reduce the oppressive and disempowering dimensions of social work interventions
  
  from Healy, K. (2005). Social work theories in context: Creating frameworks for practice. Hampshire, England: Palgrave McMillan

Concepts from a reconceptualized critical theory (Kincheloe, 2005)

1. critical enlightenment—analyzes competing power interests between groups and individuals within a society; privileged groups have an interest in supporting the status quo; identifies processes by which such power plays operate.

2. critical emancipation—attempts to gain power to control own lives in solidarity with a justice-oriented community; attempts to expose forces that prevent individuals and groups from shaping the decisions that crucially affect their lives; seeking for greater autonomy and human agency

3. rejection of economic determinism—21st century critical theorists understand that there are multiple forms of power, not just economic; however, economic factors can never be separated from the other axes of oppression

4. critique of instrumental or technical rationality—instrumental rationality separates fact from value in an obsession with proper method, losing an understanding of the value choices always involved in the production of knowledge

5. impact of desire—critical theorists embrace poststructural psychoanalysis as an important tool for discerning the unconscious processes that create resistance to progressive change and induce self-destructive behavior; psyche is no longer separated from the sociopolitical realm, i.e., desire for power can be socially constructed

6. concept of immanence—critical theorists are always concerned with what could be, what is immanent in various ways of thinking and perceiving; critical theory should thus always move beyond the contemplative realm to concrete social reforms

7. reconceptualized critical theory of power: hegemony—critical theory is intensely concerned with the need to understand the various and complex ways that power operates to dominate and shape consciousness; power is an ambiguous topic that demands detailed study and analysis—power is a basic constituent of human existence that works to shape both the oppressive and productive nature of the human tradition; concern with the oppressive aspects of power and its ability to produce inequalities and human suffering; power not always exercised through physical force but also through social psychological attempts to win people’s consent to domination through cultural institutions such as the media, schools, family and church—hegemonic social relations are often legitimized by their depiction as natural and inevitable; hegemony is always contested by groups with different agendas

8. reconceptualized critical theory of power: ideology—formation of hegemony cannot be separated from the production of ideology; ideological hegemony involves the cultural forms, the meanings, the rituals and the representations that produce consent to the status quo and individual’s particular places within it; dominant ideological practices and discourses shape our vision of reality

9. reconceptualized critical theory of power: linguistic/discursive power—language is an unstable social practice whose meaning shifts, depending upon the context in which it is used; language is not a neutral and objective description of the real world; linguistic descriptions serve to construct the world; language in the form of discourses serves as a form of regulation and domination; discursive practices are a set of tacit rules that regulate what can and cannot be said, who can speak with authority and who must listen, whose social constructions are valid and whose are erroneous and unimportant; power discourses undermine the multiple meanings of language, establishing one correct reading that implants a particular hegemonic/ideological message into the consciousness of the reader.

10. focusing on the relationships among culture, power, and domination—culture has to be viewed as a domain of struggle where the production and transmission of knowledge is always a contested process; development of mass culture has changed the way culture operates; new forms of cultural domination are produced and blur the distinction between real and simulated; the proliferation of signs and images functions as a mechanism of control in contemporary Western societies.

11. centrality of interpretation: critical hermeneutics—in knowledge work there is only interpretation, making sense of what was observed in a way that communicates understanding; the quest for understanding is a fundamental feature of human existence; no social theory or discursive form can claim a privileged position that enables it to speak as an authority

12. role of cultural pedagogy in critical theory—pedagogy refers to the ways dominant cultural agents produce particular hegemonic ways of seeing; critical theorists are intent on exposing the specifics of these processes; critical pedagogy is about connecting theory to practice—praxis—the complex combination of theory and practice resulting in informed action; questioning the relationship between particular thoughts and actions as they confront lived experience.

from Kincheloe, J.L. (2005). Critical pedagogy primer. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 50-59

Ben Agger argues that a critical theory must have (to some degree) the following features:

aIt opposes positivism because knowledge is an active construction by scientists and theorists who necessarily make assumptions about the worlds they study and thus are not strictly value-free.
aIt attempts to raise consciousness about present domination, exploitation, and oppression and to demonstrate the possibility of a future society free from these phenomena.
aIt argues that oppression is structural—that people’s everyday lives are affected by politics, economics, culture, discourse, gender, race, and so on.
aIt also argues that structures of oppression are reproduced through the internalization of dominant-subordinant relationships and it attempts to cut through this internalization of oppression by emphasizing the power of agency, both personal and collective, to transform society.
aIt avoids determinism and endorses voluntarism by arguing that social change begins in people’s everyday lives—in their family roles, workplace, consumer patterns, and so on.
aIt rejects economic determinism by conceptualizing a dialectical relationship between structure and agency—structure conditions everyday life, but knowledge of structure can help people change social conditions.
aIt holds people responsible for their own liberation and warns against any revolutionary expediency of oppressing others in the name of some future liberation.

Agger, B. (1989). Socio(ontology): A disciplinary reading. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Stephen Leonard outlines three undertakings of a critical social theory:

1. It must locate the sources of domination in actual social practices;
2. It must present an alternative vision (or at least an outline) of a life free from such domination; and
3. It must translate these tasks in a form that is intelligible to those who are oppressed in society.

Leonard, S.T. (1990). Critical theory in political practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Members of the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work's Native Peoples Curriculum Project.


February 2006, Tamaya Resort, Santa Ana Pueblo

Learn more about this project at http://npcdu.blogspot.com/