Suchergebnisse

Social justice is a central principle of the social work profession and education. However, it can become a hollow ideal unless it is specifically addressed in all applications of social work practice. Scholars have long questioned the social work profession's commitment to putting social justice into practice. Clinical social work has been particularly criticized for its lack of attention to social justice and for failing to address the concerns of the oppressed by relying on individual intervention while overlooking system-level changes. Given that clinical social work is the largest specialization in social work practice, clinical social work programs must re-envision their curriculum to fully address this criticism and educate future social workers to pursue social justice at all levels of practice. This paper presents the collective work of the social work faculty at a clinical social work program to construct a social justice-focused clinical social work curriculum, which culminated in a statement on social justice commitment in their curriculum, illustrates the iterative process of this work, and discusses the lessons from this experience. Implications include the importance of shared understanding of social justice and articulating how it operates in all aspects of social work practice as well as in social work pedagogy.

This paper presents immigrant cultural citizenship as a conceptual frame for applying postcolonial theories to social work practice with immigrants, using a case study based on the author's practice as a social worker at a community-based social service agency in the US. Postcolonial theories may help social workers to critique marginalising discourses that often reduce the immigrant experience to acculturation, to critically reflect on their role in reproducing or contesting such constructions, and to imagine creative and empowering interventions. The case of Mrs Moon, an Asian immigrant elderly client with depressive symptoms, illustrates an application of postcolonial theoretical framework to social work practice that generated a critical and contextual assessment and multi-level interventions (including individual treatment, community linkage and advocacy, and participation in collective political action), which made a transformative impact on the client and the social worker. The paper concludes with implications for postcolonial social work practice in the current climate of austerity and restrictive immigration measures.

The literature on immigrant cultural citizenship (Ong, 1996; Rosaldo, 1997) has argued that traditional and normative definitions of citizenship ignore various forms of civic participation and belonging and fails to capture the experiences of immigrants in an increasingly globalized world (Getrich, 2008), calling for more nuanced and multiple meanings of citizenship. As agents of civil society, social workers have much power in constructing and maintaining (or resisting) normative discourses of citizenship, and how we participate in this process has material consequences for those we serve. Applying poststructural and postcolonial theories, this paper excavates discourses of exclusion and inequity that produce the idea of U.S. citizenship through a critical historical analysis of key U.S. immigration and naturalization-related policies and proposes immigrant cultural citizenship as a conceptual frame for re-imagining social work practice with immigrants.

Intro -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Immigrant Community, Immigrant Identity, Cultural Citizenship -- Theoretical Frameworks: Poststructural and Postcolonial Theories -- Methodology: Critical Discourse Analysis -- "The Defining Moment" -- "What's in a Name?" -- Conclusion -- Appendix -- Bibliography -- Index

Background : social identity and situating ourselves -- Appendix: The cycle of socialization -- What is racism? -- A brief history of racism in the United States and the implications for the helping professions -- Racism and immigration -- The web of institutional racism -- Why is it so difficult for people with privilege to see racism -- Social identity formation and group membership -- Intersectionality : racism and other forms of social oppression -- Racial dialogue : talking about race and racism -- Responses to racism in the community -- Racially just agencies and organizations -- Racism and clinical work -- Teaching about race and racism -- Dismantling racism : creating the web of resistance --