Feminist links, postmodern interruptions: Critical pedagogy and social work

Affilia; Thousand Oaks; Winter 1999; Joan Pennell; Janice L Ristock;

Volume: 14
Issue: 4
Start Page: 460-481
ISSN: 08861099
Subject Feminism
Terms: Social work
Education
Colleges & universities
Abstract:
Postmodern perspectives can constructively interrupt conventional views as long as social workers remain linked to feminist and other
intersecting emancipatory movements. This article deconstructs the dichotomy between science and practice and presents a class exercise
to illustrate how an analysis of feminist links-postmodern interruptions can promote a self-critical and proactive education in foundation
courses for largely female students in historically marginalized regions of Canada and the United States.
Full Text:
Copyright Sage Publications, Inc. Winter
1999
[Headnote]
Postmodern perspectives can constructively interrupt conventional views as long as social workers remain linked to feminist and other
intersecting emancipatory movements. This article deconstructs the dichotomy between science and practice and presents a class exercise to
illustrate how an analysis of feminist links-postmodern interruptions can promote a self-critical and proactive education in foundation
courses for largely female students in historically marginalized regions of Canada and the United States.
To move into the space of deconstructing/deconstructive inquiry is... to tell... a different story "that makes a critical difference not only at
the site of thought but also at the site of sociopolitical praxis." (Spanos, 1987, p. 276)
Empowerment approaches to professional education and the new postmodern paradigms exist in an uneasy tension or outright rejection of
each other. In the social work profession, empowerment has served as a framework for countering the oppression of particular groups
(Davis, 1994; Gutierrez, Parsons, & Cox, 1998; Mondros & Wilson, 1994; Saleeby, 1997; Simon, 1994b); however, from a postmodern
perspective, any theory@ including a theory of emancipation, is suspect because it is viewed as forming a grand narrative (Lyotard, 1984)
or dominant story line about the nature of social work. Thus, some advocates of social change have argued that postmodernism is a
"dangerous approach for any marginalized group to adopt" because it provides little guidance on transforming society and becomes mired in
a nihilistic rejection of all emancipatory aims (Hartsock, 1990, p. 160; see also Di Stefano, 1990).
Others have contended that postmodernism can offer an important antidote to the totalizing thinking of so many critical thinkers and social
activists by disrupting their preestablished ways of conceptualizing the world (Hekman, 1990). Lather (1991), citing Spanos (1987), posited
that postmodern perspectives generate different stories, stories that prevent researchers and activists from assuming a posture of either
absolute certainty of truth or incapacitating uncertainty of courses of action. In moving toward deconstructing/deconstructive inquiry@ one
simultaneously dismantles what is being studied (deconstructive inquiry) and how it is being studied (deconstructing inquiry). The
combination of both activities prevents modes of thought and action from becoming rigid--or, to use Spanos's term, preterite-and
disassociated from their material and historical contexts and provides room for alternative stories or possibilities for our lives and work.
On one hand, the postmodern antidote seems to be crucial in an era when schools of social work in the United States and Canada have been
criticized for failing to incorporate multiple perspectives, particularly those from marginalized groups, and have been urged to adopt
culturally responsive approaches (Canadian Association of Schools of Social Work, 1991; Congress, 1994; Green, 1982; Lum, 1986) and to
break down the dichotomy between international and domestic curriculum content (Asamoah, Healy, & Mayadas, 1997). On the other hand,
this antidote has to be scrutinized for its effects: Will it devitalize change efforts? To address this question, social workers can assess what
postmodernism (actually postmodernisms, since this is not one body of thought), particularly deconstruction, have to offer in regard to
dismantling prevailing views in social work education. Accordingly, in this article, the authors use a deconstruction of social work
education to tease out and rethink some key assumptions and to make space for deconstructing/deconstructive social work discourses.
At the same time, to safeguard the deconstruction from sinking into a nihilistic rejection of all values, the authors endeavor to keep it
aligned with commitments to social justice for all people, whatever their gender, race, class, sexual identity, or other socially constructed
demarcations. Using Phelan's (1993) "strategic essentialism," the authors engage in a double play of rejecting dichotomies that rank people
according to supposedly essential characteristics (such as male-female and whiteblack) and simultaneously uphold these attributes as the
basis for social action. What remains, to use Elam's (1994, p. 106) term, is a "groundless solidarity@" with the foundation of oppressive
classifications and universalizing theories removed and bridges of ethical activism spanning particular situations and commitments added.
Thus, the authors' approach emphasizes not only a critique of injustices but an affirmation of real people struggling with real issues.
RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGY AS EMPOWERMENT
This approach uses a method of "research as empowerment," which "seeks to effect empowerment at all stages of the research process
through critical analysis of power and responsible use of power" (Ristock & Pennell, 1996, p. 9). This method attunes the researcher to the
power plays of what is studied and how it is studied. It also has implications for critical pedagogical practices in university classrooms that
are concerned with using power responsibly while fostering critical understandings and opening up possibilities for transformative social
action.
Questions of research theory that ask What can one know? and What good can knowing do? and questions of pedagogical theory that ask
How can one teach? and What can one learn? inform one another that when one works within an empowerment framework that seeks to
affirm real people and to disrupt what Foucault (1980, p. 131) called "regimes of truth," both those of individuals and those of academic
disciplines (Ristock & Taylor, 1998). These questions are especially pressing in the context of contemporary universities, most of which
have felt the pressure of an increasingly diverse student population. Sometimes, however, institutions respond to this pressure just by letting
others in and adding others to the existing curriculum, which leads to revolving-door access (in September and out by January) and a larger
but untransformed curriculum. The authors believe that a postmodernist pedagogy of empowerment is appropriate: one that aims to create
"home communities" from which diversely located students can begin to engage in dialogic inquiry, working together from a basis of
personal voice and respect for the different voices of others. The method is empowering in that it encourages students' voices, and it is
postmodernist in that it simultaneously draws critical attention to the constructedness of those voices.
This research method is illustrated by a classroom exercise, "My Home Community," which the first author developed for undergraduate
social work foundation courses on human behavior and the social environment first in Canada and then in the United States. The intent of
this exercise was to open a space, or home community, in the school of social work for deconstructing/deconstructive inquiry. The exercise
was seen as advancing critical social work education-a learning program open to appraising what social work is doing and why (reflexivity)
and committed to reflective and responsible courses of social change (praxis).
In the authors' experience with antiviolence and prodemocratic action research, research as empowerment is sustained through a culture of
feminist links and postmodern interruptions. The feminist links keep the research firmly aligned with efforts to overcome gender and other
intersecting forms of oppression. Feminist links, or partnerships, appear to be of special relevance to the social work profession, whose
workforce and clientele are not only predominately female but whose primary role as caregivers leads to devaluation in a society that
esteems science and technology over service (see Van Den Bergh, 1995). The postmodern interruptions ensure that the positions remain
flexible and responsive to culture and context; otherwise, feminist links could enforce conformity to political correctness. As C. Brown
(1994) posited, "Pedagogically, and politically, it is possible to recognize diversity of experience and yet challenge people to explore how
these experiences have been socially, historically and politically constructed" (p. 42). Likewise, feminist perspectives interrupt postmodern
thinking that challenges grand narratives and, in so doing, could obscure material or concrete forces that shape women's and men's lives.
As feminists, the authors both advance feminist links; however, the first author, a social-work educator, carries out the deconstruction from
within the profession, a deconstruction that is subject to questioning from the second author, a community psychologist based in women's
studies. The intent of the deconstruction is to advance a critical stance toward social work education that appraises social work discourses
(systems of statements on social interventions) in their contexts, so as not to reproduce relations of subordination. In carrying out this
deconstruction, the authors seek to nudge social workers and others to expand the range of possibilities for professional education by
challenging the assumptions of the discipline about the nature of the "subject," both the subject of social work and the subject who does
social work. The ultimate aim is to promote empowerment and to work toward social change, that is, simultaneously to assert individual and
collective control over one's destiny within a nexus of mutually caring relationships (see Rappaport, 1990).
DECONSTRUCTING/DECONSTRUCTIVE SOCIAL WORK DISCOURSES
Although social work has various intellectual roots (Payne, 1991; Reamer, 1993) and social work education has diverse stances on its
mission and approaches (Dinerman & Geismar, 1984), the profession in the United States and Canada, as in England, has been heavily
influenced from its early days by a White, middle-class sense of morality (Valverde, 1991). This notion of morality has shaped social
service administration and practice and has limited the capacity of women social workers and service users to effect change together (see
Callahan, 1993). Reflecting on the current status of social work education, Munson (1994) warned that the development and creativity of
schools of social work will be stymied by adhering to narrowly framed criteria of excellence, and pointed to the control exercised through
governmental financing and employers' preferences over social work curricula.
Nevertheless, marginalized groups are pushing for an expansion of its knowledge base and methods and are urging a movement beyond
conventional content and even prescriptions of cultural sensitivity to highlight alternative worldviews and practices and, particularly in the
case of indigenous peoples, advancing their control over educational programs (see, e.g., Morrissette, McKenzie, & Morrissette, 1993; Pace
& Smith, 1990; Pennell, Flaherty, Gravel, Milliken, & Neuman, 1993). In response, some social work educators (such as Leonard, 1994;
Rossiter, 1993; Schriver, 1998) have urged the adoption of postmodern thinking to foster a climate for developing a critical pedagogy in
social work education that attends to previously marginalized perspectives.
A primary tool for such excavation is deconstruction, the uncovering and overturning of the central assumption of a discourse (Culler,
1982), and through this decentering, opening the way for telling "different stories." In this article, the authors begin by identifying the core
assumption of social work discourse that scientifically derived knowledge should serve as the guide for social work practice. They then
destabilize this assumption by pointing to discursive evidence that reverses, negates, and displaces it while still using it, and thus expanding
the range of what is possible. The aim of deconstruction is not to destroy the central assumption, one on which social workers continue to
depend, but, rather, to bring it to its limits, to exhaust its intellectual resources and reveal its illogic. Its benefit, as Derrida (1981)
explicated, is that in keeping positions "confounded" (p. 96), it serves to
confirm and shake logocentric [rationalistic] and ethnocentric [European-based] assuredness ... to transform concepts, to displace them, to
turn them against their presuppositions, to reinscribe them in other chains, and little by little to modify the terrain of our work and thereby
produce new configurations. (p. 24)
Such "disruptive voices," feminist researcher Fine (1992) stated, "unearth, interrupt, and open new frames for intellectual and political
theory and change" (p. 220).
Home Communities
Deconstructive objectives may appear grandiose and elusive when one engages in undergraduate social work education, but from a
postmodern perspective, they are all the more called for when the course is intended to orient students to a set of foundational theories for
subsequent courses and practice in the field. The unfamiliar and androcentric theories typically covered in courses on human behavior and
the social environment (see Burden & Gottlieb, 1987; Humphreys, Nol, & Laird, 1997), however, are likely to push students to keep up
with the extensive material, rather than to allow them the safety and space to dismantle the underlying assumptions. In the case of the
Canadian and U.S. courses, these pressures were compounded by the students' gender and location.
The students who completed the exercise discussed here were mostly female and attended universities in historically marginalized regions
of their countries, although the presence of more prosperous communities was evident in both. The Canadian students were enrolled at a
university in the province of Newfoundland on the geographic and political-economic periphery of Canada. This province had experienced
chronic poverty, unemployment, and out-migration, further exacerbated by the collapse of its primary industry, fishing, and counterbalanced
by its residents' sense of loyalty to their families and communities, traditions of mutual support, and resistance to outside restructuring
(Burford, 1997; Fairley, Leys, & Sacouman, 1990). The U.S. students attended a university in North Carolina, a state that has historically
been marginalized culturally, economically, and politically but at the time in question was experiencing extensive but uneven economic
growth, leading to a disjunction between what has been called the New South and the Old South. Whereas the industrialized, urbanized, and
air-conditioned New South has been heralded for its introduction of progress and prosperity@ the rural Old South has been reviled for its
parochialism, prejudice, and backwardness and simultaneously esteemed for its attachments, honor, and sentiment (Boles, 1995; Cash,
1941). Whether the students came from these regions (although the majority did), their current educational and practice milieus were out of
keeping with those of the many Eurocentric, Northern, or Mainland (in the case of Newfoundland) theories and studies that they were
assigned to read.
Differences in social location were also evident between the instructor and students and among groups of students. The instructor came
from the outside, whether as a Mainlander to Newfoundland or a Northerner to North Carolina; likewise the identities of the students at both
universities were split along lines of ethnicity, race, religion, and region. These differences were especially likely to breed caution and
covert power plays in social work programs in which the students were evaluated not only academically but in regard to their suitability for
their chosen profession. The cautiousness was likely to go beyond inhibiting the expression of their views to guarding their subjectivities,
that is, their contingent and changeable sense of self, to conform to the expectations of their profession, university, instructor, and
classmates. Given the multiple and mixed expectations that were tugging on the students' subjectivities, the first author, in designing the
course, asked, How can students affirm their own identities and respect their classmates' and recognize how their subjectivities are
constructed through their material and discursive contexts? How can students use their experiences and regional context to challenge the
biases in course theories (deconstructive inquiry) and question their own assumptions (deconstructing inquiry)? How can this course
encourage a dismantling of the students' and others' assumptions about human behavior and the social environment but promote the vision
of social work as socially responsible action?
Without any ready or final answers, the first author started by seeking to foster a safe space for deconstructing/deconstructive inquiry
Pointing out disparities between theories and students' contexts or highlighting academic power plays so early in the course would be likely
to confuse and intimidate the students. Instead, the first author opened the Canadian and U.S. courses with an exercise called "My Home
Community" to emphasize identity, connection, dialogue, and change. On the worksheet for the exercise, the aim was presented as
constructing theories on community out of class members' experiences of their home communities. The students were not confined to one
definition of home community but were asked to "pick the place that you think of as your home community-it could be where you grew up
or whatever place feels most like home to you." To encourage emotional safety and respect, much of the discussion was conducted in
groups of three students, with each small group deciding what it wanted to present to the class of approximately 35. The worksheet
emphasized that students were to share only what they felt "comfortable talking about" and to "treat with respect what others [said] about
their home communities" and "not discuss it outside the [small] group without their permission."
In both countries, each student, as well as the instructor, identified his or her home community and explained why it felt like home, citing
significant attachments, memories, and commitments. Most of the students geographically located their home communities, pointing with
pride to the communities' positions on a map. This activity educated the other class members (including the instructor) on the geography of
the province or state, and, in turn, gave them the opportunity to present the places with which they identified. In the second part of the
exercise, the students were asked to consider ways of creating a learning community in their social work programs. This activity generated
extensive discussion of the ways in which their programs did and did not feel like their home communities and of strategies for heightening
their sense of community within the program.
The students' main response was that the class exercise was welcoming. It gave them a friendly forum in which to become connected with
each other, the instructor, and the course, which was in sharp contrast to many of their previous experiences of university life. Building on
this opening, later class exercises and assignments encouraged the students to check out the relevance and ethics of course materials against
their personal and practice experiences. Both courses sought to affirm the strengths of historically marginalized peoples and regions; in
addition, to counter the global dominance of the United States, the North Carolina course stressed international initiatives and perspectives.
The presentation of these applications at home and abroad served a dual purpose of encouraging the students to question both the course
theories and their own experiences.
Identifying: Science Over Practice
In constructing the class exercise, the first author acknowledged a key assumption of social work education: that education for social work
practice takes place under academic auspices. During the first session, the students, seated in a university classroom, were handed a course
outline with stipulated course sessions, readings, and assignments, as well as a worksheet on their first class exercise. The message was that
the university speaks with authority on what preparation students require to graduate as social workers.
This message reflects the profession's roots in the social upheaval of the 19th century and the prevailing scientific ethos that the ills of
modem society could be remedied through planning by "men of reason" (see Friedmann, 1987). From the outset, social work in Canada and
the United States was conceived as a means of effecting moral reform guided by scientific knowledge, rather than the vagaries of a
charitable impulse (Simon, 1994a; Trattner, 1984; Valverde, 1991). The belief that women were, by nature, too emotional for efficient
planning justified their control by male boards of directors and administrators (Struthers, 1987). The "scientific imperative" was firmly
entrenched in U.S. and Canadian social work, with social surveys used to document the extent of social ills and to promote the necessity of
professional social work services (Irving, 1992; Zimbalist, 1977).
The aspirations of the fledgling profession for scientific legitimacy were undermined, however, by Flexner's (1915) well-known speech to a
U.S. conference of social workers. In that period, Flexner was considered the leading authority on professional education and had studied
medical education in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Thus, his conclusion-that social work was disqualified as a profession because
it (unlike the prototype profession of medicine) failed to delimit a systematic body of knowledge-gained immediate attention and continued
to haunt social work nearly a century later (Austin, 1983; Haynes, 1998).
More than 50 years after Flexner's diagnosis, Etzioni (1969) and others characterized social work, along with nursing, library science, and
early education, as semiprofessions and observed that they had one notable attribute in common: the prevalence of women workers. One
contributor to Etzioni's volume, Toren (1969, p. 157), commented that social work's more recent recruitment from "lower social strata"
further eroded its professional status. Etzioni's and Toren's solution for raising the semiprofessions to professional status was to weight their
composition toward male workers. More recently, Baines (1991) agreed that the prevalence of women in these professions eroded their
social power but added that the rationalization of women's professionalism was based not on specialized knowledge and expertise, as in the
case of men, but on "an ethic of service or care" (p. 37). Contrary to Etzioni, Toren, and others, she argued that recruiting more men would
not raise the status of and achieve equality for a women's profession; instead, she asserted that the solution lies in identifying and rewarding
the skills and knowledge of caring labor.
Partly to bolster assertions of social work's scientific base, the education of social workers was placed in universities, rather than
independent schools affiliated with social agencies (see Gripton, Nutter, Irving, & Murphy, 1995). This decision was made and upheld
despite the fluctuating support of university administrators (Irving, 1992) and the opposition of some early social work leaders, particularly
the influential Mary Richmond, who contended that social workers were best educated in the field, where they could develop "practice
wisdom."
The move into the universities reflected the Platonic assumption that rational knowledge precedes and guides correct practice and the
positivist assertion that valid knowledge is generated through objective study detached from personal passions and political strife. As
numerous feminists have pointed out, notions of what qualifies as rational knowledge and scientific study are grounded in androcentrism
and European imperialism, which privilege certain perspectives as universal truths (Harding, 1986). In social work, the academic auspices
have been maintained, despite the reservations of feminists and others (Valentich, 1996).
Although social work education has retained links with agency practice through field-instruction programs and fields-of-practice courses,
the dominance of the university is evident in the discourse on social work education. A case in point is the Encyclopedia of Social Work's
description of social work education, which affirms practice but confirms the flow of knowledge from the university classroom to agency
practice:
Social work education has developed within the context of agencies and agency practice. The application of classroom learning in agency or
field practicum settings has been a characteristic of social work education throughout its history." (Frumkin & Lloyd, 1995, p. 2244)
Reversing: Practice Over Science
At the same time, the quote from the Encyclopedia of Social Work can be used to upend the rationalist assumption in social work discourse
that classroom knowledge should dictate agency practice. "The context of agencies" is acknowledged as the site in which social work
education developed; there would be no social work education or, as is true of any other profession, no social work itself, without its
enactment in fields of practice. Thus, contrary to the Platonic view, the instructional nature of the field is affirmed. Such a belief is
congruent with John Dewey's influential pragmatic philosophy of learning through doing and, more specifically, supported the winning side
in the early debate between proponents of practice wisdom oriented to microlevel intervention versus those of social theory oriented to
macrolevel planning (Austin, 1983). Although Mary Richmond lost the battle of locating social work education in the university, she
succeeded in establishing close links between schools and field placements and advancing theory based on practice. Thus, it can be argued
that within social work discourse, the hierarchy of scientific knowledge over experiential insights actually rests on the primacy of the latter.
The class exercise was in keeping with this reversed assumption. Its aim, as stated on the instruction sheets, was to "construct together a
theory of community out of our own experiences," instead of social workers applying theories to themselves and those with whom they
work as professionals. Together, the class was engaging in a form of participatory action research (Alary, Beausoleil, Guedon, Lariviere, &
Mazer, 1990; Whyte, 1991) in which by sharing experiences and reflecting on these experiences, they were constructing their own
conclusions. Ignoring but reflecting the academic debates on the meaning of community (McKnight, 1987; Solomon, 1976; Warren &
Lyon, 1988), these students emphasized what was important to them: place of origin, ties of blood and friendship, commitments of faith and
identification, and settings of informality and comfort.
Negating; Both Science and Practice
Giving precedence to either scientific knowledge or experiential wisdom, however, assumes that they are separable entities. Within social
work discourse, this assumption is contradicted by radical voices, such as those of socialist, feminist, and womanist social workers (Bricker-
Jenkins & Hooyman, 1986; Chan & Dilworth, 1995; Saulnier, 1996). To transform society, these radical voices stress the necessity of a
raised awareness of racism, classism, sexism, and other types of injustice and increasingly recognize the interlocking and interactive nature
of forms of oppression (see E. B. Brown, 1990; Collins, 1990). Such an awareness cannot be generated through either abstract theorizing or
unreflective action. It requires reflexivity@ dialogue, and praxis: identifying the human interests underlying the production of knowledge,
engaging in an unshackled exchange of views, and interweaving the recreation of knowledge in line with emancipatory action and the
reformation of action in line with emancipatory knowledge (see Freire, 1970; Habermas, 1970). Thus, from this vantage point, the struggle
for social change reveals the fiction that science is outside of material interests, rejoins science and practice, and negates the original
assumption that science guides practice.
"My Home Community" was not an overt exercise in uncovering oppression; the class analyzed neither the power of imposed theories nor
the power of the instructor in expecting the class to take part in the exercise. Nevertheless, in the first class sessions it offered an implicit
challenge to control exerted by outside authorities over the views of two, largely female, groups of students living in historically
marginalized areas of their countries. Out of the discussion, the students synthesized their own definitions of community and used these
definitions to examine what was lacking in their own academic programs and what could be done to strengthen their sense of community
with each other. Thus, the exercise was a gentle way of freeing up space for reconceptualizing science-practice and using this space for
creating change in the social work program and elsewhere. The process was one of research as empowerment, with the potential for
reshifting power relations and serving as a first step toward developing a critical pedagogy. As a poststructuralist feminist position suggests,
social workers cannot claim single-strategy pedagogies of empowerment, emancipation, and liberation (Luke & Gore, 1992).
Displacing: Neither Science Nor Practice
Although the exercise encouraged the students to draw on the understandings developed from their own experiences, it did not establish
their experiences as the final word on community. As Scott (1992) suggested, "When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the
vision of the individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence upon
which explanation is built" (p. 25). In the class exercise, the students listened to the understandings emerging from other students'
experiences and were encouraged to recognize how their own notions of community were a product of their particular experiences and
locations. For instance, the majority of the students viewed their home communities as where they grew up; their preconceptions were
challenged by other students whose lives reflected greater transiency and whose sense of home community was embedded in the current
location of their mattress and stereo. In a double gesture, the exercise both affirmed personal understandings and encouraged the students to
explore how their own understandings of themselves and the world are constructed (see Lather, 1991). Thus, the exercise disrupted not only
concepts of science as the authoritative basis of knowledge, but also experience. In so doing, it left room for many definitions of
community, emphasizing multiple definitions and courses of action. At the same time, it did not promote the relativistic view that all
theories are of equal value and, instead, gave greater weight to notions of responsible actions for building community. After defining home
community, the students were expected to develop concrete strategies for creating a sense of community in their programs. The exercise
and, more broadly, the course sought to cultivate in students an openness to many views and discernment in assessing the capacity of these
views to advance community, responsibility, and empowerment.
This openness to other experiences and perspectives is in keeping with the social work dictum of "starting where the client is," one that is so
hard to maintain in practice. Paralleling the dilemmas of the professor-student relationship, social work practitioners may try to set up
relationships with clients of respect, safety, and open dialogue, but they can never fully, authentically achieve such relationships because
they are in a position of power, authority, and responsibility@ Although social workers may not abuse their positions, the whole context and
history of the profession mark the interaction as 'unbalanced.
The difficulty is compounded by schools of social work that promote ideas of science and practice shaped by primarily Eurocentric and
urban influences. This practice has led to an obscuring of perspectives from other cultures (Charter, 1996), and the problem becomes
especially prominent in work across cultures. As Swift, Allen, and Naidoo (1996) found in their research on cross-cultural social work,
practitioners require flexibility, openness, and creativity to avoid an assimilationist position, to attend respectfully to other worldviews, and
to intervene effectively. These researchers proposed that the "emerging postmodern discourse has the potential to create a good 'fit' between
theory and practice because of its attention to fluidity, multiplicity of meaning and inclusivity, all of which are central to cross cultural
work" (p. 18).
Pushing out, softening, and reshaping the boundaries of social work knowledge and practice create room for alternative views. It no longer
makes sense to speak of "science" or "practice," which become plural and loose. Altering social work discourse to speak of sciences
displaces Western notions of the centrality of rational and empirical inquiry to include traditional and changing knowledge; likewise, the
term practices encourages flexible responses to variant contexts and shifting discourses. Most important, such language reminds social
workers to "imagine again and again that when a narrative is constructed, something is left out," to ask "over and over again, What is it that
is left out?" and to "know the limits of the narratives, rather than establish the narratives as solutions for the future, for the arrival of social
justice" (Spivak, 1990, pp. 18-19). The exercise "My Home Community" was one way of asking the students what has been left out of
social work theory while identifying that if they are to advance empowerment, they need to acknowledge that their experiences also leave
things out.
TAKING ACTION
The method discussed here is not restricted to social work and can be used by professionals from many other disciplines who are interested
in doing transformative action. The focus on feminist links and postmodern interruptions may at first cause a sort of paralysis. In the second
author's course on research in women's studies, in which students are asked to locate themselves and address power plays in their research,
ethical questions, such as Who can know? and How can one know? may seem overwhelming. Yet, modem emancipation movements have
worked from the premise that reasoning subjects can identify their common experiences of oppression and unite in solidarity to overcome
systemic injustices. Such grand narratives have effectively promoted significant causes, whether for the betterment of women, colonized
peoples, or the environment. At the same time, they have reified dichotomies, the result being not only the widening of rifts among groups
but the rendering of rifts within a group invisible. Researchers, practitioners, and educators are not bound, however, to an either-or choice
between scientifically derived knowledge and practice-based wisdom, between expertise and caring, between links and interruptions. This
understanding can help overcome paralysis. Building home communities within research and pedagogical practices is a way of generating
the space for telling and listening to many stories (stories that unite, disagree, contradict, and dismantle) to develop reasonable, responsible,
and self-critical approaches to social work and the education of its practitioners.
[Reference]
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[Author note]
Authors' Note: An earlier version of this article was presented at the Canadian Association of Schools of Social Work Learned Societies
Conference, Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario, June 1996, and published in Social Work Discussion Papers: Trends in Social Work
Education, Issue 2, Memorial University of Newfoundland School of Social Work, St. John's. The authors thank Marie Weil for her
feedback on the manuscript.

[Author note]
Joan Pennell, Ph.D., is a professor and director of the Social Work Program, North Carolina State University, Campus Box 7639, Raleigh,
NC 27695-7639; e-mail: [email protected].
Janice L. Ristock, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Women's Studies Program, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Address all correspondence to Dr. Pennell.