Rethinking Anti-Discriminatory and Anti-Oppressive Theories for Social Work Practice by Christine Cocker Trish Hafford-Letchfield

Author:Christine Cocker, Trish Hafford-Letchfield [Christine Cocker, Trish Hafford-Letchfield]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Social Services & Welfare, Social Security
ISBN: 9781137023988
Google: qplMDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Published: 2014-01-01T03:16:34+00:00

Implications for Social Work Practice

The materiality perspective described above allows social workers to ask what ‘subjectivity’ is performed when we talk about a discriminated ‘subjectivity’ or a ‘subjected body’. How do social workers calibrate subjectivity when thinking about discrimination and oppression as a network of embodied material relations?

While social workers will interpret information and take decisions on the basis of heterogeneous factors that are not necessarily well defined, I think it helpful if we adopt in social work the notion of a ‘calculating subject’, albeit in a materialist way. Callon and Muniesa define calculation as starting ‘by establishing distinctions between things or states of the world, and by imagining and estimating courses of action associated with things or with those states as well as their consequences’ (2003, p. 5). From this definitional point of view the distinction between judgement and calculation is avoided (Callon et al., 2002). Focusing on the economy of qualities allows us to describe the relationship between social workers and clients as a performativity – a calculable performance. Aggregation, sorting and assessment methods are constantly at work in social work (Bowker and Star, 1999). A new way of conceiving of the relations of discrimination running through and structuring social work thus emerges, by considering that they are inscribed in relations of calculation. Calculations of wage, mobility, position, supply and demand for services and, at an individual level, the potential for change. The very shift from the term client to service user in social work not only refers to an evaluation of traded goods, but the way such goods are calculatingly allocated in a discriminatory way. Discrimination is a material device for calculating values on the basis of several interlocking social dimensions (for example, class, gender, race, age, sexuality and ability). We should take as our point of departure the transactions that occur in discriminatory relations, that is, not the macrostructure of say a racial discourse but its ‘microstructure’, a particularly useful concept borrowed from economics – the slave trade in women, children and ethnic groups being a particularly poignant and horrific example of such calculating markets. Moreover, such a perspective on discrimination allows us to ask which ‘subjects’ are exempt (or prevented, depending on the point of view) from calculation.

To give a feel for the implications of the materiality perspective on discrimination for social work practice, a ‘politics of the subject’ is proposed that concentrates on the materiality of issues. That is how the materiality of issues, such as zero hours contracts or confinement of asylum seekers, function to (re)produce certain forms of relations and, in this case, relations of social and economic discrimination. This is a form of realism which asserts that real things exist – these things are objects, not just amorphous ‘matter’, objects of all shapes from nuclear waste and poverty to birds’ nests (Morton, 2011). Such an approach to politics is not about discourse, the mode of analysis that has preoccupied postmodern social work for a decade or more. Some might object that things like roads, houses and power plants are cultural in character.

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