Working Across Difference

Social Work, Social Policy and Social Justice

Donna Baines, Bindi Bennett, Susan Goodwin, Margot Rawsthorne

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781352006407
• eBook ISBN: 9781350313316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Lavoro in ambito sociale

Social Workers in Australia are increasingly called upon to work across social differences in ways that promote social justice and challenge growing inequity, and anti-oppressive practice has been put at the heart of qualifying programmes. In this exciting new collection, some of Australia's leading social work academics explore working across so-called human differences within the context of contemporary social work. By drawing on the insights and theories of people who have been positioned as 'different', the authors use practice vignettes and original data to provide ways to join theory and practice, with a primary focus on thinking about how to change patterns of social difference. Whether a social work student or an experienced practitioner, Working Across Differences is essential reading for anyone who values anti-oppressive practice and social justice

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Introduction

Margot Rawsthorne

As editors we wish to start this book with an acknowledgement of the ongoing history of dispossession and deliberate attacks on the cultures and spirituality of Australia’s First Peoples. This history gives us great pain and enormous regret at the devaluing of knowledge acquired by the First Peoples during 70,000 years of continuous life on this land. The inability of non-Indigenous Australians to learn from First Peoples is to our collective detriment, whether through inclusive social norms or communal forms of child-rearing, the demise of soil, or threats of extinction of unique fauna.

Social work practice is implicated not only in the discounting of Aboriginal knowledge and an unwillingness to learn from it but also in the destructive intervention in the lives of generations of Indigenous Australians (Bennett, 2015; Briskman, 2016). Working across difference with Australia’s First Peoples requires urgent attention. Accordingly, the book includes several chapters written by or with Indigenous Australians. These chapters are not presented as ‘the’ Aboriginal perspective but offer insight into the experience of multiple ‘differences’ in settings as diverse as academia, health, community and violence against women services. For non-Indigenous (white) readers these chapters provide an opportunity to listen and learn from Indigenous Australians, from a position of cultural humility.

This book arose from our shared struggles in practice, theory, research and teaching to ‘work across difference’. The term ‘differences’ denotes a set of highly politicised, socially constructed, social relations that reinforce inequity, dominance and oppression. Difference benefits racially stratified, patriarchal capitalism but are simultaneously a site of struggle, something to work with and across, something that we inhabit and may inadvertently reproduce through daily practice and something that can be challenged and dealt with more equitably with a goal of social justice and fairness.

Writing from her social positioning within the intersections of race, gender, class and homophobia, the late Audre Lorde (2012) argued that

Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behaviour and expectation. (p. 17)

Social work and policy studies in Australia are increasingly called on to work across differences in ways that promote social justice and challenge growing inequity. However, as Lorde (Lorde and Rich, 1981) noted, we have no patterns for relating across human differences as equals and, as she argues further, ‘Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people’ (Lorde, 2012, p.115).

This quote highlights the way in which larger social systems benefit from both the denial of difference and our lack of strategies for identifying and working across real and imagined differences. These ‘differences’ justify inequity, harm and divide us and thrive off the existence of disposable people and regions of the world that can be exploited, destroyed and left to decline (Giroux, 2015). Lorde argues further that

it is not the differences that separate us, it is our denial of their existence and our inability to critically examine and challenge their impact on social and individual actions and ideas. Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insur-mountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. (Lorde, 2012, p.115; reprint from a 1977 speech delivered to the Modern Language Association)

This book is aimed at ending isolations of all kinds and building intercon-nections that recognise and celebrate differences, redistribute resources and ensure voice and representation in the building of equity-directed social justice practices and policies.

In this collection, the term differences is also used in Lorde’s (2012) sense that much of the work of changing social relations lies with those who are more powerfully positioned within intersecting oppressions:

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future. (p. 92)

Unearned privilege underlies these dynamics. This privilege is not distributed equally but accumulates along axes of power such as male-ness, whiteness, gender, immigrant status, able-bodiedness and so forth (Mehrotra, 2010). These socially constructed relations form intersecting nodes of power and privilege that operate without the conscious instigation of those accorded this power in our society. For example, light-skinned immigrants do not wake up in the morning and decide to make use of white-skin privilege; it is part of everyday interactions without the need for conscious activation. Part of working across difference includes recognising and ‘un-doing’ this invisible but omnipresent privilege (Kennedy-Kish et al., 2017; Pease, 2010).

The contributors to this book highlight the need for intersectionality in our analysis, as critical race theorists have identified, as a tool for resistance (Carbado et al., 2013; Crenshaw, 1989). Intersectionality recognises that oppressions never operate singly; rather they overlap, reinforce, undermine and contest in complex and ever-changing webs (Mehrotra, 2010). Dismantling the many, intersecting threads of these webs requires a crisp, critical analysis and openness to new ways of challenging inequity and building social justice.

This collection does not provide a prescription for working across dif-ference; instead it problematises intersecting differences and privileges in numerous contexts, and offers insights into more equitable ways of undertaking social work and making social policy. Working across difference is more than simply having promotional material in other languages, scattering around a few rainbow flags or employing the occa-sional non-white person. The task of ‘working across difference’ requires profound, ongoing, consistent efforts to make any meaningful progress towards our shared commitment to social change and equity. Oppression and privilege are deeply embedded through the hegemony of binary genders, settler colonialism, racism, ageism and ableism (Allan et al., 2009; Kennedy-Kish et al., 2017).

Despite social work’s genuine concern with the experience of those subjected to oppression and ‘othered’, it remains too often uncritical of its own privilege and power, and its participation, often unintended, in sustaining oppressive relations (Bennett, 2015; Briskman, 2016). In this book we take a critical stance to the social work profession’s current and historical ‘social justice project’. We question the extent to which the actions of social workers and social policy makers have challenged structural oppressions. We ask, what would decolonised practice look like? How do we respond to mental distress without resorting to power/privilege/ violence? In what ways do our practices disable? How do we disrupt the ‘marking’ of some identities as less than? This critical questioning of our role as social workers, policy makers and community activists needs to inform our ongoing ‘social justice project’, which may provide a pathway for rethinking social work beyond merely ‘doing good’.

In rethinking social work beyond unintentionally doing harm while intending to be ‘doing good’ we are also reclaiming the centrality of the profession’s ethical pursuit of human rights and social justice (IASSW, 2004). The danger of human rights and social justice becoming optional in social work practice (Ife, 2012) is even greater in the current context of austerity and late neoliberalism (Baines, 2017; Mullaly, 2010). Neoliberalism is understood in this collection as simultaneously a project, an ideology and a process (Dean, 2010; Harvey, 2007). The ideology of neoliberalism has introduced ‘a new model of citizenship in which societal rights and responsibilities transform social problems into the failures of the individuals rather than that of society’ (Birch and Mykhnenko, 2009, p. 7).

Taking this further, Roy (2014) argues that neoliberalism reconcep-tualises poverty as an ‘identity problem’, negating the systemic causes of inequality: ‘Poverty … is often framed as an identity problem, as though the poor have not been created by injustice but are a lost tribe who just happen to exist’ (p. 37). Neoliberal ideology is so pervasive that it becomes almost impossible to challenge (as it is presented as the only option), saturating mass cultural and political realms, and creating new social norms and monoculture (Gray and Webb, 2013; Harvey, 2007). Under neoliberalism, power relations are reconfigured such that individuals internalise the state’s ‘marketisation’ objectives through self-regulation and self-governance (Foucault, 1984). As such power is decentred, as opposed to being exclusively and overtly hierarchical and authoritarian, as it has become embedded in the beliefs, fears, desires and aspirations of the population (Brown, 2006). This has made neoliberalism almost invisible and the assimilation of social workers into the neoliberal political project less contested than it should be (Gray and Web, 2013; Mullaly, 2010).

Social service organisations and practitioners have been deeply challenged by the doctrine of small government, marketisation, individual responsibilisation, growing inequality and attacks on collective responses and resistance (Fawcett et al., 2010). Social work responses to neoliberal discourses’ marking of certain groups as ‘different’ (read inadequate and unworthy) are often constrained by bureaucratic standardised practices which purport to be neutral (Allan et al., 2009; Gray and Web, 2013; Kennedy-Kish et al., 2017). These standardised practices often target those who social workers seek to work alongside in our social justice work, through imposing income support sanctions, rationing access to support, and/or criminalising and removing children. It is sobering to consider that more Indigenous children are currently in state ‘care’ than during the period known as the ‘Stolen Generation’ (Long and Sephton, 2011). In their putative neutrality these practices depoliticise social work practice, remaking it as a technical profession rather than a social justice-engaged vocation (Baines, 2017; Mullaly, 2010).

Through this book and in collaboration with our contributors we sought to explore how social work may repeat, reject, resist or rupture exclusionary practices based on difference. In doing so we deliberately privilege the perspectives of those positioned as ‘different’, through race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender and ability. In privileging these perspectives we are not suggesting that ‘difference’ is only a concern of those in dominant cultural positions. Our goal is to open up dialogue and debate concerning notions of difference with a view to the co-creation of new forms of social work practices. We acknowledge the risk of totalising the identities of ‘others’ through this and have tried to highlight the intersection of multiple (and at times contradictory) positionalities among ourselves and the people we work alongside (Mehrotra, 2010). Through adopting an intersectional stance we aim to resist collapsing difference under universal categories (Tong, 1989) and acknowledge as Lorde does that ‘her shackles may look very different to my own’ (Lorde, 2012, p. 124). This signals a rejection of the neoliberal discourse of a benign, uncontested ‘diversity’ which serves to obscure the very real, day-to-day structural inequality and oppression experienced by non-white, distressed, older, disabled and other marginalised people. Though we draw on concepts and strategies from the postmodern and poststructural critique, we consciously seek to avoid the paralysing effect of postmodern perspectives that do not provide the basis for collective political actions (Ramazanoglu and Holland, 2002). Our contributors seek to avoid identity politics that fail to acknowledge the material subjugation of those ‘othered’ (Zuffery, 2015) or the benefits that accrue to privileged groups through this. Rupturing exclusionary practices requires more than linguistic shifts or clever deconstructing. It requires structural as well as cultural and political solutions, including a concrete, material redistribu-tion of resources, practices, policies, representation and access to affirming identities and cultural practices (Kennedy-Kish et al., 2017).

Though each situation and context requires its own unique strategies rather than a standardised response, the following points are helpful in thinking about and working across difference:

1.Recognising that multiple, intersecting differences exist in every interaction and context (Mehrotra, 2010).

2.Developing a critical lens for analysing these differences and understanding why they exist in any given context, who they benefit/harm and how to use this analysis to build consensus for action.

3.Working as an ally with those socially positioned as less powerful and less privileged (Bishop, 2012...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part 1: Aboriginal Perspectives
• Part 2: Critical Perspectives on Cultural Difference
• Part 3: Critical Perspectives on Gender Difference
• Part 4: Critical Perspectives on Normality and Difference
• Part 5: Policy Work Across Difference
• Index