Rethinking Empowerment: A Postmodern Reappraisal for Emancipatory Practice

Making healthy choices easy choices: the role of empowerment

“…There are at least two complicating factors. Firstly, as Pease (2002) argues, there seems to be a paradox in being a professional and being committed to empowerment. An essential part of a profession is the profession-specific knowledge base.…”

Using Persona Dolls as an Anti-Oppressive Technique in the South African Social Work Curriculum

“…Anti-oppressive/anti-discriminatory practice which has its precedents in radical, structural, feminist and anti-racist theoretical approaches has become the prevailing model in social work in the United Kingdom (Dalrymple & Burke, 1995;Dominelli, 2002;Pollack, 2004;Thompson, 2003Thompson, , 2006; Canada (Barnoff & Moffat, 2007;Carniol, 1992;Coates, 1992;Mullaly, 2002;Razack, 2002); Australia and New Zealand (Fook, 1993;Healy, 2005;Pease & Fook, 1999;Pease, 2002;Waldegrave, Tamases, Tuhaka, & Campbell, 2003) and the USA (Finn & Jacobson, 2003a, 2003bSwigonski, 1996). The goal of anti-oppressive and antidiscriminatory practice is to promote social justice, transformation, equity and inclusivity by challenging various forms of oppression experienced by people who are differentially positioned.…”

Culturally Relevant, Socially Just Social Work Supervision: Becoming Visible Through a Social Constructionist Lens

“…This emphasis given to administrative and/or managerial functions promotes "hierarchical, competitive, power-based relationships" (Brashears, 1995, p. 695) that discount the knowledge of the social worker and ignores larger social and political contexts. However, it is by acknowledging these contexts that social work stands out as a political and moral enterprise, challenging the power relations that place individuals, families, and communities in positions of distress, marginalization, and oppression (Parton & O'Byrne, 2000;Pease, 2002).…”

“…A common experience for university-trained social workers is learning from white faculty members about homogeneous, time-bound identities of people from particular racial or minority groups. In contrast to a modernist worldview, an SC perspective identifies how configurations of culture can be intentionally or unwittingly used to validate or discount, liberate or subjugate individuals, families, and groups according to how knowledge and power intersect (Foucault, 1984;Pease, 2002;Pease & Fook, 1999). Furthermore, this conceptual framework challenges the assumed centrality and superiority of Euro-Western categories of people, legitimizes other voices and knowledge, and creates a multifaceted, tentatively held view of culture (Dewees, 2001;Laird, 1998;Saleebey, 1994).…”