Do no further harm: becoming a White ally in child welfare work with Aboriginal children, families, and communities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Australian Social Work, 2013
Historically, few Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social workers have joined and remained active members of the professional organisation that represents the interests of the social work profession, the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW). This research project uses qualitative methodology to investigate barriers to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation in the AASW and propose how these barriers might be overcome. In offering insights from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the research findings address issues of social justice, equity, and social disadvantage. They suggest ways of improving cross cultural relationships and practices that will increase practice knowledge and promote a more effective and sustainable relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social workers and the AASW.
2009
This article describes a unique community-based, participatory action research partnership between Elders, an urban Aboriginal community health and social services agency, Aboriginal university faculty, non-Aboriginal faculty, and research participants working together to develop culturally safe best practices in social work and human service field education in Aboriginal community health settings. The article reflects on the process of creating the space to talk together about issues of power, trust, and relationship with respect to histories of colonization past and present within research partnerships. The authors use narratives to link their experiences working as members of this interdisciplinary and intersectional research team moving across various social locations. Experiences are discussed alongside descriptions outlining the process of engagement for respective research team members within a culturally safe and intersectional framework. Grounding the research team in its c...
Children and Youth Services Review
This research addresses one of the most pressing and controversial issues facing child welfare policymakers and practitioners today: the dramatic overrepresentation of Indigenous families in North American public child welfare systems. Effective, inclusive education is one necessary component of efforts to reduce such disparities. Yet recruiting students from various cultural communities to the field and educating white social work students and professionals to practice in culturally responsive ways are ongoing challenges. In this ethnography, we examine an apparently successful model of inclusive education: the Center for Regional and Tribal Child Welfare Studies (the Center) at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, School of Social Work. For over a decade, the Center has graduated Indigenous and non-Indigenous child welfare workers with MSWs now practicing within tribal communities, as well as provided continuing education for child welfare professionals. At the Center, Indigenous scholars and social workers, tribal leaders and their allies design and sustain a model of honoring and integrating Indigenous worldviews with Western social work. Experiential learningengaging the "heart and head"is a cornerstone of the Center's educational practices. Students and professional colleagues are approached with a "good heart" as "relatives" with positive intentions. They learn about the spirituality, language, culture and history of Indigenous people. The strengths-based curriculum also includes challenging content on the legacy of genocide and historical trauma on Indigenous families and communities, as well as contemporary laws and policies such as the Indian Child Welfare Act. The educational worldview and practices of the Center provide understanding for social work, generally, and child welfare, specifically, that supports effective practice and policy within diverse communities. work educational models and practices, as well as child welfare systems. It promises to provide understanding for social work, generally, and child welfare, specifically, that will contribute to effective practice and policy within our diverse communities; and create collaborations to reduce system barriers to equitable practice.
This article examines the ways in which racialized social workers negotiate the values and practices of a social work profession that is constituted through scripts of whiteness. In particular, I examine how social work imagines itself as a site of social justice and goodness, and the processes through which racialized workers’ desires to be good collide with the racist encounters experienced in everyday sites of practice. I build upon scholarship that critiques the centralization of whiteness in social work and makes visible the liberal foundations of the profession that are implicated in constituting colonial and imperial practices of moral superiority. I argue that the professional values and practices committed to the goals of social justice are the same values and practices that reinstall whiteness and underpin incidents of racial violence. Historically, racialized bodies have been constituted as the Other—subjects to be regulated, controlled, and saved within the colonial project by white, bourgeois subjects. This article, based on interviews with racialized social workers in Canada, examines the dilemmas that emerge when racialized Others become the helpers and perform an identity that historically was never meant for them. Keywords: race, racism, whiteness, colonialism, critical social work
How White is Social Work in Australia
Australian Social Work, 2011
How White is social work in Australia? This paper analyses this question, focusing on social work practice and education. In asking the question, the aim is to open space for debate about how the social work profession in Australia should progress practice with Indigenous people and issues. The paper combines Bourdieu's concept of the habitus with ''Whiteness'' theory to argue that the profession is socially, economically, culturally, and geographically separated from Indigenous people and that the consequences for how social workers engage with their Indigenous clients have yet to be fully explored. Decentring Whiteness requires recognition of epistemological and ontological assumptions so deeply embedded that they are invisible to those who carry them. This invisibility permits White privilege to exist unacknowledged and unchallenged within societal formations. In shifting the focus away from the ''Other'' to the ''non Other'', an examination of Whiteness asks social workers to examine their own racial location and the role of White privilege in their lives. It requires us to go beyond intellectual commitments to antiracism and antioppression, and to make racial issues personal as well as political.
Attracting more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to the social work profession is an important strategy in responding to Indigenous disadvantage in Australia. The literature suggests that the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, knowledge, and skills in social work is impeded by racism and white privilege. This article reports on a research project that aimed to explore the field education experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social work students. The findings highlight the need to address racism, increase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academic staff, and value cultural mentors in social work education.
Critical Multiculturalism, Whiteness, and Social Work
Journal of Progressive Human Services, 2006
In this paper, I suggest that most cultural diversity classes in social work are taught from a liberal or conservative multicultural perspective that precludes a power analysis and a critical discussion of whiteness. In order to undo this status quo, social educators and practitioners need to incorporate critical multiculturalismas a tool in subverting racism. A critical multicultural practice includes an analysis of whiteness and a commitment on the part of white social workers to take up an antiracist practice. Pedagogical strategies are described that unmask whiteness. Finally, Stephen Madigan's oppositional whiteness, illustrated in a case vignette, is illustrated as an antiracist practice in which a white social worker/therapist situates his own privilege and becomes an ally.
Seeing White: Turning the postcolonial lens on social work in Australia
Social Work & Policy Studies: Social Justice, Practice and Theory, 2020
Social work is a profession based on (White) Euro-American concepts, problems and historicity in which Indigenous knowledges and cultures are marginalised, and the effects of colonisation are obscured to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous social workers. Cultural competence is increasingly emphasised and expected of social work graduates internationally to make the voices, stories, and knowledges of Indigenous peoples who have been, and continue to be, marginalised heard. The conventional approach to cultural competence in social work is however problematic as it maintains rather than challenges the universality of Whiteness in Australia through a fixed gaze on the Indigenous 'other'. To decolonise social work however requires a critical understanding of the development of social work identity and ideology within the context of colonialism and postcolonialism. The article subsequently argues for the use of postcolonial theory to shift the focus from the effects of colonisation on Indigenous peoples to the colonial origin and continued coloniality of the social work profession, practice and curriculum within Australia. The purpose of turning the postcolonial lens on social work is not to build an argument for non-White social work but to build an understanding from which social work can support the Indigenous struggle for self-determination, decolonisation and social justice.