Learning to play chess: How to make sense of a politics of representation with people in poverty

Abstract

Despite the growing involvement of people in poverty in social policy, their participation does not necessarily take place on a par with policymakers, as the latter often do not really embrace their demands for social justice. It is, therefore, argued that social work has a role to play in the process of merging knowledge of people in poverty with that of policymakers and other stakeholders by representing their perspectives in public debate. By drawing on an in‐depth qualitative research of five “Associations where People in Poverty Raise their Voice” (Belgium), the complexity of the direct participation of people in poverty in such a politics of representation is analyzed, as well as the different roles social work practitioners can take on in dealing with this complexity. Here, two roles are distinguished: “a guardian of collective and transformative elements”; and “a strategical chess player.” We conclude that practitioners need to reflect critically on participatory premises and practices and consider whether these strategies actually contribute to societal change. However, the ideal of parity of participation entails that such strategic considerations should always be collaboratively discussed with people in poverty.

Redistribution and recognition in social work practice: Lessons learned from providing material assistance in child protection settings.

“…SAAR-HEIMAN AND KRUMER-NEVO redistributive practice looks like in direct practice. The second is that most of the writing inspired by Nancy Fraser focuses on community-level practice or policy practice (e.g., Boone et al, 2019a) without attending to the implementation of this theory in direct practice. We claim that the findings of our study shed light on a unique example of direct social work practice that embodies Fraser's two-dimensional conception of justice.…”

“…The first is that although it is quite clear how the politics of recognition come into play in social workers’ direct practice, there is a lack of clarity regarding what the manifestation of redistributive practice looks like in direct practice. The second is that most of the writing inspired by Nancy Fraser focuses on community-level practice or policy practice (e.g., Boone et al, 2019a) without attending to the implementation of this theory in direct practice.…”

The policy engagement of social workers: a research overview

“…In two Israeli studies on the PP of community SWs, it emerged that pressure from service users and members of the community encouraged SWs to engage in PP (Aviv et al, 2021;Gilboa and Weiss-Gal, 2022). This influence can also take a more structured form, as is the case of service users living in poverty that participated in the formulation of policies alongside SWs in Flanders (Boone et al, 2019). The origin of this approach was the formulation of the general report on poverty in Belgium between 1992 and 1995.…”

Theorizing notions of the participation of people in poverty in social policymaking: Policing, politics and subjectification

“…Since the 1990s, a participation paradigm emerged in political decision-making in general, and in social policy development in particular (Boone, Roets, & Roose, 2019;Carr, 2007;H. Dean, 1992H.…”