Social Work

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https://hdl.handle.net/10315/28581

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Open Access
Manufacturing Bad Workers: How Oppressive Practices in Child Protection are Maintained
(2024-07-18) Azevedo, Joanne Jenny; McKeen, Wendy E.
This research seeks to better understand the institutional mechanisms that work to maintain oppressive practices in child protection social work settings. This research examines the ways in which the child protection system continues to function in discriminatory and punitive ways that are not reliably effective at keeping children safe from abuse or neglect. These oppressive functions remain despite what can be presumed to be the best of intentions of legislators, policy makers, administrators, and child protection social workers (CPW), and despite the countless legislative, policy, and practice changes that have been embarked upon to reform child protection in Ontario in the past. Using methods informed by Institutional Ethnography (IE), this research examines how the various attempts at reform to the child protection system in Ontario have changed the ways that frontline child protection workers carry out their work and interact with their service recipients. In addition to an IE approach, this research incorporates autoethnography to include direct experiences and observations as a means to unpack some of the ways that frontline CPWs experience, respond to, and are complicit with oppressive practices. Also included is an examination of a recent reform in Ontario, the implementation of the Child Protection Information Network (CPIN) between 2014 and 2019. CPIN provides an opportunity to examine how child protection work is organized, and some of the ways that CPWs themselves are recruited into the ‘work’ of maintaining the status quo. Participants shared their experiences around the ways that CPIN integrated neoliberal rationalities, solidifying commitments to cost-saving, efficiency, and heavy regulation. Rather than disrupting structures of oppression endemic to the systems of child protection, reform efforts like CPIN serve to maintain and even further entrench disparities. To sustain itself, child welfare draws CPWs into understandings of ostensible benevolence as ‘child saviours’, fostering relational distance that allows for and enables dehumanization, and employs rigorous and fear-motivated accountability circuits that keep workers in line, while punishing those who fall outside them. In other words, in its current form, the child welfare system, to sustain itself, must be invested in manufacturing “bad” workers.
Open Access
'Blackness' and Its Ethical and Social Implications: Discursive Impositions, Colonial Entrapments, and the Attendant Phenomenological Questions
(2023-12-08) Garang, Kuir; Mule, Nick J.
In this dissertation, I investigate the moral and social problems associated with ‘blackness’ in its historical and contemporary usage. Since ‘blackness’ now identifies continental and diaspora Africans (CADA) without major moral concerns, it seems ‘blackness’ has been normalized in society. From the 1960s, ‘blackness’ has become beautiful, socially uplifting and politically effective as a resistive socio-political and socio-economic device. This positive outlook apparently suggests that ‘blackness’ has been delinked from its historical problematics as the signifier of ugliness, evil, immorality, barbarism, etc. My findings suggest this is not necessarily the case. Even today, ‘blackness’ continues to play an exclusionary and denigrating function. More than half a century after the end of official imperial colonialism and formal racial segregation in the Americas, CADA have accepted skin colour as opposed to cultures and geographies to be a global, unifying identity. Using archival sources and a multidisciplinary scholarly literature, from the classical antiquity (Ancient Rome and Greece) to the present, I interrogated how ‘blackness’, which was used by the slave and the colonial regimes to commodify, segregate, debase, and socially patronize CADA, finds positive, decolonial social currency in its contemporary normalization. Four theories have been helpful: Phenomenology, genealogy, postcolonial theory and Gramscian hegemony. Through phenomenology I interrogate what ‘blackness’ means. Through Foucault’s genealogy, I interrogate how ‘blackness’ changed overtime and how discourse was used to impose it. I use postcolonial theory to interrogate the colonial era under which ‘blackness’ was operationalized by the colonial and the slave regimes. Finally, Gramsci’s hegemony through consent helped me make sense of how ‘blackness’ is still relevant today. I wondered if there is a significant difference between ‘blackness’ as used by the colonial and the slave regimes and ‘blackness’ as used today. My findings show that ‘blackness’ still pays unintentional homages to colonial epistemes and epistemologies. I have called these homages colonial traps and bad faith. Colonial traps are hegemonies through consent. Bad faith is a willing and knowing abdication of personal responsibility. That ‘blackness’ is necessary for solidarity and resistive purposes against colour-based prejudices has been put to the test within this colonial entrapment context. CADA, who have convincingly shown over the last hundred years that they are capable of successfully challenging Eurocentric hegemonies, seem unable to wiggle out of colonial appellations.
Open Access
An Arm of the Carceral State: Mental Health Social Worker Complicity in Police Violence
(2023-12-08) Wong,Edward Frederick; Chapman,Chris
Mass protests against racist police violence in the past decades have led to growing calls for anti-carceral alternatives, including replacing police officers with social workers for mental health crises. But this proposal deserves closer scrutiny considering how mental health social workers have long collaborated with the police. I explore the specificities of these collaborations, along with the discursive underpinnings. These practices are situated in their institutional contexts and the broader intermeshing contexts of racism, settler-colonialism, and disablism. Mental health social workers-initiated police intervention is an integral part of daily social work practice. Institutional ethnographic interviews with mental health social workers and an examination of social work texts reveal three major elements informing mental health social worker-initiated police intervention. First, interviewees consistently cited fear of professional disciplinary measures and other professional obligations as fueling calls for police intervention as a standard response to certain scenarios. The professional ethos of social work, born out of efforts to achieve greater legitimacy and remunerations, and in particular the subjectification of social workers as agents of the carceral state enshrined with the power to intervene upon the lives of oppressed people, also underpins these social work practices. Second, the notion of risk is often brought up as rationale for mental health social worker-initiated police intervention, alluding to mental health social workers serving as specialized forecasters of future harm. This rationalization is tied to the mental health field’s eugenicist origins that conceptualized mad and racialized people as dangerous threats to be contained through repressive measures like forced sterilization, anti-miscegenation, immigration restrictions, and confinement. Finally, mental health social worker-initiated police intervention exists in the context of the settler-colonial capitalist order. The crisis situations described by interviewees as precipitating police intervention are rooted in structural factors, but social workers engage in the task of erasing or obfuscating these underlying processes as a part of their work as disciplinarians. This work illustrates how mental health social workers are a part of the institutional archipelago, the constellation of institutions and practices that operate through carceral logics in the service of maintaining Canadian settler-colonial capitalism.
Open Access
Captive Minds in Expulsion: Carcerality in the (Mis)Education of Young Black Males
(2023-08-04) Sibblis, Camisha Antonette; Heron, Barbara
Black male students are excluded from school at rates that exceed their representation in the school population. Additionally, school disciplinary sanctions are associated with academic failure, incarceration and anti-social behaviour among Black students. This study explored the experiences and outlooks of excluded Black male youth and how they are constructed in the Ontario education system. It also delved into the ways in which the identities of Black male youth shift as a result of their time in spaces of exclusion, such as expulsion programs. A qualitative Critical Race Methodology was used to formulate deep understanding of subjectivity as it pertains to school excluded Black males. The sample consisted of 13 self-identified Black males (n=13) between the ages of 18-28 years old, who had either graduated from an Ontario Safe Schools expulsion program, completed their term, had been otherwise demitted or decided not to attend. The sample also included two Black mothers (n=2) of the participants. Individual interviews were conducted using a life history method combined with visual timelines. The findings showed that participants experienced expulsion programs as carceral spaces. The spaces significantly influence young Black men’s self concepts and impose upon them what I call carceral identities. Furthermore, in reflecting on their interpretations of hegemonic masculinity, participants revealed a fundamental ontological rupture: the ubiquity of the carceral in the lives of Black boys for whom prison techniques and concentrated disciplinary power have permeated exclusive school spaces, causing a type of dissonance that I refer to as carceral dislocation. The conclusion of this work contributes to theorizations that in addition to establishing a direct path from schools to prisons, these programs are carceral spaces situating the prisons inside of the schools apropos of the school-to-prison pipeline. While this study was conducted prior to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education system, the findings of this study combined with the mainstream shift to virtual schooling make a case for a radical revisioning of school discipline and uncovering the anti-Blackness inherent in education practices in Ontario.
Open Access
The Construction of the Skilled and Healthy Immigrant
(2021-11-15) Issari, Sasan; Mule, Nick J.
The purpose of this study is to explore how skilled racialized immigrants (SRIs) make sense of their well-being when they immigrate to Canada under the Federal Skilled Workers Program (FSWP). To fulfill this purpose, I used an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to conduct 12 qualitative semi-structured interviews with individuals who self-identified as skilled racialized immigrants. IPA is a useful research method to explore the interpretations and meanings that participants give to the phenomena of well-being. IPA fits with my epistemological and ontological perspective that skilled racialized immigrants are the true experts of their lives. Since knowledge is socially constructed, governed by power relations, and contextually bound, a decolonizing theoretical orientation is well suited to explore this topic area. The findings reveal that the participants are forced to start from scratch in Canada, since they struggled to have their credentials recognized here. An intersectional lens is particularly useful for this study, as it uncovers the different experiences of the participants. The participants do not perceive themselves as passive victims of intersectional oppression, colonial racism, and othering practices. Rather, they are active agents of social change, as they disrupt and resist the oppression they encounter in society. Furthermore, the participants were critical of the FSWP, since for most their dream of working in their field in Canada turned out to be a nightmare. The thesis findings contribute to the field of mental health, immigration, and employment, for there is a scarcity of literature that discusses the impact of social and structural determinants of health on skilled racialized immigrants in Canada. The thesis concludes with recommendations and implications for social work education, practice, and policy.
Open Access
Mapping Ruling Relations Through Homelessness Organizing
(2020-08-11) Withers, A.J.; McKeen, Wendy E.
Poor peoples organizing can be effective even in periods of neoliberal retrenchment. This dissertation examines ruling relations and the social relations of struggle from the standpoint of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. With political activist ethnography as my central theoretical framework and methodological approach, I conducted field research, interviews and textual analysis of City and organizational documents. Focusing on OCAPs homelessness campaigns, I examine the social relations of struggle in three campaigns in Toronto: a campaign to stop the criminalization of homeless people in a public park by private security, a campaign to increase access to a social assistance benefit for people in emergency housing need, and a campaign to increase the number and improve the conditions of emergency shelter beds. My research demonstrates the active and ongoing research and theorization that anti-poverty activists engage in as well as the practices of delegitimization, excluding critique, testimonial injustice and epistemic violence that ruling relations engage in to counter activist research and theory. Some of this research and theory has regarded both Housing First policy and philosophy and Torontos emergency shelter system which OCAP, homeless people and other advocates have been decrying as unjust and inept for years. This dissertation explicates some of the ways that the City works to delegitimize its challengers and demonstrates the validity of many of the longstanding critiques of the ruling regime. While the City of Toronto has worked to contain homelessness organizing in Toronto, and deployed numerous demobilization tactics to do so, each campaign was fully or partially successful. Full or partial victories were secured by anti-poverty activists through the use (or threat) of direct action tactics.
Open Access
The Entanglements of Canada's National Identity Building and Vietnamese Canadian Community Conflicts: Racial Capitalist Democracy and the Cold War Neoliberal Multicultural Subject
(2019-11-22) Ngo, Anh Phung; Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita
This study weaves Cold War Epistemology, critical multiculturalism, racial capitalism, and critical refugee studies to theorize how the Vietnamese Canadian subjectivity is related to Canadas national identity formation. Adopting a critical ethnography methodology and discourse analysis, this study asks: What are the conditions of community conflicts within the Vietnamese community and how are those conflicts related to the processes of Canadian national identity formation? The production and contestation of Vietnamese Canadian subjectivity in the making of Canadian national identity is traced through three major sites of analysis. This first site is the debate on the Memorial to Victims of Communism as captured in the media. The second site is the parliamentary and community commemoration of the Fall of Saigon on April 30th, 1975 which includes debates on the Journey to Freedom Day Act and local community events. The final site is a Toronto community agency conflict of identity. This study reveals the logic of racial capitalist democracy underlying Canadian national identity as free, humanitarian, democratic, and peace-making. This is constructed through the production of Vietnamese Canadian subjectivity as a particular model minority and model refugee framed within Cold War neoliberal and multicultural discourse with significant consequences to the wellbeing of the community.
Open Access
Tracing the Invisible Borders of Canadian Citizenship: Critical Analysis of Social Work with Noncitizens
(2019-07-02) Ghelani, Chizuru Nobe; Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita
This thesis interrogates the notion of citizenship as a social good through critical analysis of Canadian social work with noncitizens. Drawing on multidisciplinary scholarshipcritical border scholarship, Indigenous studies, critical race studies, settler colonial studies, affect theories, and Foucaults notion of powerI consider both the historical and contemporary contexts in which social work with noncitizens has become invested in Canadian citizenship. My thesis addresses the co-constitutive dimension of border and citizenship and proposes the concept of inner borders to elucidate the ways in which inclusionary and exclusionary functions at the territorial border are internalized within the nation-state. I theorize social work as a site of inner border making where the boundaries of national membership and belonging are drawn through everyday practices of inclusion and exclusion. Weaving together interview data with social workers, policy analysis on immigration and citizenship changes, and historical analysis of border making, I conduct three strands of analysis of border making in social work that attend to: (1) entangled histories of the settler colonial project, immigration, and social work; (2) the contemporary context of neoliberalism and its relations to social work with noncitizens; and (3) affective relations involved in social work with noncitizens. My research findings reveal that the discourse of civility is fundamental to border making in Canada. The discourse of civility was foundational to the settler colonial project, which relied on the discursive construction of Indigenous peoples as uncivilized vis--vis civilized European settlers. The discourse of civility functioned not only to legitimize the violent land dispossession by Europeans but also as a mechanism to govern the internal lives of members of Canadian society, whereby whiteness, Britishness, and masculinity were defined as the ultimate standard of progress and orderliness. Early social work played a key role in reproducing the discourse of white civility as it emerged and developed as the professional helper. The examination of contemporary social work with noncitizens reveals that, though different in its expression, the discourse of civility continues to shape the standard script of Canadian citizenship, demarcating the boundaries of national membership and belonging. However, the manner in which the discourse of civility works on, through, and within contemporary social workers is contingent and complex. My study highlights some of the ways in which the discourse of civility operates in constructing the multiple forms of inner borders in social work with noncitizens.
Open Access
LBTQ Muslim Women in Intersectionality: Examining the Resistance Strategies
(2019-03-05) Khan, Maryam; Mule, Nick J.
This qualitative study critically examined life stories of 14 Lesbian, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LBTQ) Muslim women in the Global North (Canada and the U.S.) within an interpretive paradigm. Emphasis was placed on how LBTQ Muslim women lived out the intersections of (race, sexuality, gender identity and expression, religion, and spirituality) as well as addressing community, societal and familial dimensions amongst hegemonic discourses that exist within normative Muslim and LGBTQ communities. Transnational and critical race feminism, intersectionality theory and an Islamic liberationist approach to gender and sexuality frame the project. Findings suggest that the women do not abandon Islam, sexual and/or gender identity while living out lives; and LBTQ Muslim women resist hegemonic discourses within normative Muslim and LGBTQ communities vis--vis principles within the Islamicate tradition.
Open Access
Exploring Barriers Refugees and Refugee Claimants Experienced Accessing Reproductive Health Care Services in Toronto
(2019-03-05) Gateri, Helen Waigumo; Mule, Nick J.
A qualitative feminist study was conducted to explore the access barriers to three reproductive health care services: prenatal care, postnatal care, and screening for cervical cancer, experienced by women refugee claimants in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The study was informed by social constructionist epistemology and antiracist and intersectional perspectives, and focused on the social, political, economic, and historical contexts of the participants lives and their experiences with migration and the Canadian health care system. Sixteen women refugee claimants and 6 service providers were interviewed individually. The study explored how the systems, structures, and policies of Canadian society shaped refugee claimants womens use of these services, or lack thereof, and shaped their everyday life experiences. The research findings indicated that the study participants immigration status, lack of health coverage, living arrangements, absence of service provider support, degree of health care knowledge, discrimination, and having suffered pain, discomfort, or trauma in the past impacted their use or lack of use of prenatal care, postnatal care, and cancer screening services. An intersectional analysis revealed that the gendered and racialized immigration and integration policies, and neoliberal ideologies and practices intersected to locate the participants in racialized and disadvantaged situations as the other wherein access to these services became challenging. Women refugee claimants access to these and other reproductive healthcare services needs to be understood beyond the attempts to know their cultural health beliefs and practices, and beyond the neoliberal ideas of self-care, individual responsibility, and culturally sensitive care. Equitable access to healthcare cannot be ensured without resisting these womens racialized position as the other while addressing the social, political, historical, and structural inequities in Canadian society. To ensure barrier-free, full health care coverage to women refugee claimants, as well as other refugee claimants and immigrants, social inequities need to be addressed coupled with instituting broader structural changes federally and provincially in policies, funding, procedures, and practices.
Open Access
Governance Through Participation: An Inquiry into the Social Relations of Community-Based Research
(2017-07-27) Janes, Julia Elizabeth; O'Connell, Anne M. B.
Community-based research (CBR) is consistently held up as a benchmark for socially just knowledge production. Calls for the intensification of and further institutionalization of CBR indicate the discursive value of community-engaged research, but its material effects are unclear. CBRs claims to egalitarian, emancipatory research relations and outcomes remain largely uninterrogated and the participative practices and collaborative relations under documented and theorized. This study of the social relations of CBR theorizes participatory research as a site of governance. Specifically, I inquire into how the social relations of CBR are governed through affect, participatory practices, colonial processes of subjectification, institutional arrangements, as well as resisted as counter governmental practices. I draw on poststructural, postcolonial and affect theories in dialogue with the critical reflections of twenty-nine academic, community-based professionals, and peer CBR collaborators to bring forth the complexity of governmental practices. I develop a methodology of Dialogic Theoretical Pluralism to produce five distinct strands of theoretical analyses, which trouble the discursive and material practices of collaborative research, while not foreclosing on its possibilities. I argue that conversants desires to do socially transformative research are unmet and reconfigure CBR as a site of scaffolding community collaborators toward social mobility. These desires activate participative practices of access to and appropriation of community knowledges and labour to produce a tertiary, low cost and precarious knowledge work force. Colonial subject-making practices of CBR, which are raced, gendered and classed, secure the benevolence and expertise of academe against community subjects Othered as lacking beneficiaries in need of capacity building. Institutional arrangements coordinate time, authorize who is a legitimate knower, and consign community collaborators and community benefit to the margins. These governmental practices are not total and institutionalized norms of CBR are resisted through unsettling affect, strategic subjectivities, dissent and distance, and revitalized commitments to social and epistemic transformation. Despite these transgressive practices, the reconfiguration of CBR as an individual intervention in a context of eroding support to social programming and social change warrants sustained attention to the ways in which participation colludes with the very neoliberal/colonial projects it aims to contest.
Open Access
Surviving Racist Culture: Strategies of Managing Racism among Gay Men of Colour - An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
(2017-07-27) Giwa, Sulaimon; Razack, Narda
Racism, a unique source of stress, occupies a peripheral point of analysis in the literature on gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) health research. Canadian investigators have not examined the coping strategies that non-White gay men use. Lacking knowledge of the groups coping responses overlooks the dynamics of resistance and prevents interventions for addressing racism from being developed. The current studys aims were to explore the contexts in which gay men of colour experienced gay-specific racism; to investigate their understanding of factors contributing to the experience of racism; and to examine strategies they used to manage the stress of racism. Foregrounding issues of White supremacy and racial oppression, the study used frameworks from critical race and queer theories and minority stress theory, integrating insights from the psychological model of stress and coping. Data were collected in Ottawa, Canada, employing focus groups and in-depth interviews with 13 gay men who identified as Black, East Asian, South Asian, and Arab/Middle Eastern. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), the study concluded that racism was pervasive in Ottawas GLB community, at individual, institutional, and cultural levels. Racial-cultural socialization processes were found to influence racist attitudes and practices. Racisms subtle, insidious forms undermined discrimination claims by gay men of colour, in that White gay men denied any racist attitudes and actions. In general, participants used problem- and emotion-focused coping techniques to moderate the impact of racism. The value of social support for coping with the stress of racism was highlighted, revealing a vacuum of care in public health and social work practice with gay men of colour. Social workers and allied health professionals should neither view the experiences of gay men of colour through the lens of sexual orientation alone, nor focus solely on sexual behaviours that place them at risk of HIV/AIDS. In doing so, they would risk not only discounting the complexities of the mens lives, but also sustaining and perpetuating a life without potentialities beyond deficit. The implications and limitations as well as recommendations for future study are discussed.
Open Access
Theorizing the Local: Diversity, Race and Belonging in the City of Toronto
(2016-11-25) Almeida, Shana M.; Heron, Barbara
This thesis engages with critical race and postcolonial theories to explore how race is reproduced and organized through diversity discourse in the City of Toronto. The central question of my research is: which historical conditions and practices, tied to what kind of truth-claims, are re-articulated and justified by diversity discourse? The focus of this study is an examination of how power is negotiated and transformed through multiple conceptual and embodied schisms into the re-production and justification of particular truths which, in turn, provide conditions for the possibility of diversity discourse in the present. My research involves two phases: interviews with 15 racialized City of Toronto staff to explore their multiple positionings in the active subjectivization and instrumentation of diversity discourse, and a detailed genealogical review of past and present diversity-related documents from the City of Toronto to expose the illegitimate accounts of diversity discourse. In this second phase, I begin to reflect diversity in the City as a series of events, bending to the will of political and racial forces and their effects. I draw and expand upon critical discourse analysis to analyze how the uses and understandings of diversity by racialized staff get taken up and reproduced through formal City documents. This helps me to outline the complex conditions of power and resistance, and how they are negotiated by racialized City of Toronto staff in and through the institution. In my analyses, I demonstrate how diversity discourse limits the belonging of racial Others in the City of Toronto, whereby they become articulate(d) subjects only to the extent that diversity is reiterated, reproduced, and cited by them, and through them. I also explore how diversity discourse invites negotiations of belonging via being bound with deeply affective longings to be not-strange, not-raced, with the understanding that the various subjectivities that are caught up in processes of yearning are reproduced through diversity discourse as racialized subjects. Finally, in my conclusion I attend to the ideas of complicity, contradiction and refusal in diversity work, as mechanisms of disruption. I also reveal my own complex and produced positionings in this diversity work, as one who seemingly stands outside the research, in order to expose my own complicities in the very violence which I seek to make visible and disrupt.
Open Access
Somali-Canadian Women: Historical Past of Survival and Facing Everyday Challenges of Resettlement?
(2016-11-25) Bokore, Nimo; Mule, Nick
Using a qualitative life history methodology, this study explores the migration and integration experiences of Somali-Canadian women/mothers who resettled in Toronto and Ottawa. This study focuses on womens narratives at each stage of migration and resettlement. It explores the internal and external barriers that are now contributing to the Somalis prolonged poverty and a life of toxic stress in Canada. In addition, this study identifies external barriers such as geopolitically based economic/social exclusions as well as internal barriers such as fear and isolation that are silent, systemic and are currently working against Somali-Canadians and other Black ethnic groups. Since 1978 reports from the Horn of Africa depicted a bleak picture of a region in crisis mainly from the areas inhabited by Somali ethnic groups. The contributors of this ongoing crisis have been the long absence of formal governance in that region, the longstanding tribal conflicts in other regions, reports of famine, political Islam, piracy, kidnapping, and mass displacement. According to recent UNHCR reports (2009, 2011, 2012 & 2015), there are now approximately 1.4 million internally displaced Somalis within what was known before 1991 as the Somali Republic and nearly one million Somali refugees who have fled to neighbouring countries. Because of these longstanding regional issues, many Somali refugees resettled in Canada in the late 1990s and early 2000. Upon arrival searching for social support, the overwhelming majority of Somalis began to resettle in Toronto and other major cities including Ottawa. In this study, the narratives of survival in these womens stories were analyzed using a multidisciplinary approach including knowledge from social neuroscience. The findings indicate that more than two decades after their initial arrival the majority of Somali-Canadians still live under stressful, poverty ridden and toxic environments with the possibility of transference of trauma to the next generation. Finally, this study concludes with a recommendation as to how to create an indigenous social work intervention that is acceptable, effective, and meaningful for this ethnic group.
Open Access
A Feminist Dialogic Encounter with Refugee Women
(2016-09-20) Nabukeera, Christine; Good Gingrich, Luann M.
ABSTRACT This study sought to examine (1) how refugee women who have experienced violent displacement manage the resettlement process and negotiate new identities in unfamiliar settings, and (2) explore ways in which social work practice can be involved in refugee womens lives more effectively and sensitively in accordance with feminist dialogism. Although extensive research on violent displacements exists, little is known about the women fleeing sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Self-reported effects of violent displacement on women and how to address its consequences adequately have yet to be given much attention in social work research. My dissertation pioneers a theorization that builds bridges across knowledge systems by mediating between European and certain aspects of African perspectives to facilitate the resettlement of traumatized and vulnerable refugee women from the Great Lakes region of Africa. Informed by a feminist dialogical approach to qualitative research, my dissertation presents a detailed analysis of ten in-depth, loosely structured interviews with eight participants in addition to my extensive field notes. As power shifted from my voice, the researchers, to the diverse voices of the participants, the process necessitated the adoption of a qualitative approach. I make the case for an approach that views the world as multi-voiced and takes into account participants perspectives, transcends fixed assumptions and embraces points of view that embody collective voices. A feminist dialogical approach to social work research and practice regards the face-to-face encounter as a site of ethical responsibility towards the other. Such a theorization implies that the relationship between self and other underscores responsibility as central to a justice oriented practice. Using Bakhtins concept of otherness and Levinas infinite other, I created dialogic spaces to foreground my ethical responsibility to the other. Notions of the infinite other and otherness allowed me to pay attention to silent voices while acknowledging the limitations of my conceptions and knowledge claims. The proposed approach is well-suited to working with diverse communities that include various underrepresented others such as the African other, woman as other and the refugee other from the Great Lakes region. The methodology can also be used to understand peculiar experiences of displacement and identity reconstruction for women who fled other non-European conflict zones, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, which shares many characteristics with the Great Lakes region.
Open Access
The Social Organization of South Asian Immigrant Women's Mothering in Canada
(2016-09-20) Ferzana Chaze; Susan Lee McGrath
This research examines the social organization of newcomer South Asian womens mothering work. It explicates the processes that contribute to South Asian women making changes to their mothering work after immigrating to Canada despite having reservations about the same. Data for this research was collected through interviews with 20 South Asian immigrant mothers who were raising school aged children in Canada and had been in the country for less than five years. Eight key informant interviews were conducted with persons who engaged with immigrant families in their work on an ongoing basis for insights into how their work connected to the work of the South Asian mothers. Government policies, websites and newspaper reports also form important data sources for this study. Using Institutional Ethnography, the research shows the disjuncture between the mothering work of the South Asian immigrant woman and institutionally backed neoliberal discourses in Canada around mothering, schooling and immigrant employment. The research shows the manner in which the settlement experiences for South Asian immigrant women became stressful and complicated by the changes they needed to make to their lives to coordinate with these institutional discourses. The study explicates how the work of immigrant mother in the settlement process in the home, in relation to the school, and in relation to her own employment changes over time as she participates in social relations that require her to raise her children as autonomous responsible persons/citizens who can participate in a neoliberal economy characterised by precarious work. The study throws light on the complexity of settlement work for South Asian immigrant women and on the manner in which South Asian immigrant mothers values/priorities in relation to raising children become subordinate to more dominant set of values driven by global neoliberal influences that stress autonomy. The study has implications for the social work profession that is connected in many ways to the settlement experiences of immigrant women.
Open Access
This Is What We Know: Working from the Margins in Child Welfare
(2015-08-28) Kikulwe, Daniel Kiggala; Swift, Karen Judith
This study investigates the work processes of racialized child welfare workers within hierarchical institutions and involves an understanding of several day-to-day child welfare activities such as case decisions, work training, court attendance, and work with families, as well as supervisors, co-workers and collaterals. While practicing, workers negotiate the power dimensions within the different and pre-determined work relations involving supervisors, colleagues, collaterals, families and children. The negotiating of power relations is complex and includes experiences of racial tension which are incorporated in the analysis. As the participants were both men and women with some workers being immigrants who had their own personal experiences of poverty, the analysis also recognizes the complexities of both gender and class. Part of the negotiation by the participants relates to addressing the tension that arises when their cultural values conflict with existing policies and laws, as well as institutional hierarchies. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ideas of power, knowledge and the subject, this study analyzes the forms and uses of power through systems of differentiation, surveillance and hierarchical structures which provide a unique, relevant and applicable theoretical background to the understanding of race, gender, and class. The study adopts a qualitative methodology, an approach that allows for an exploration and understanding of the work experiences of racialized workers. The stories of the twenty-one participants involved in this research are significant and profound, and warrant attention. The study concludes that issues of race, gender and class alter perceptions and practice with families and thus calls for the integration of alternative ways of knowing within the dominant child welfare knowledge to better serve families and address experiences of tension by racialized child welfare workers.
Open Access
Authorities on the Subject: Deportation and the Confluence of Violence within Forensic Mental Health and Immigration Systems
(2015-01-26) Ameil, Jesus Joseph; Rossiter, Amy B.
The practice of deportation for those identified with “mental illness” in Canada is one unique and telling confluence whereby contemporary conceptions, interpretations, functions of discourse, and technologies of “mental illness”, “criminality”, and “race” can be studied through the shared texts of the mental health, criminal justice, and immigration systems. These systems rely on seemingly separate operations in order to continue common violent projects of segregation, confinement, removal, the application of harm to the physical body and the identification of people as inherently dehumanized. In this study, contemporary deportation appeal decisions documents, archival documents and secondary deportation appeals data are analyzed drawing on postcolonial theory, Gadamerian philosophy, an attention to confluence and the subjective, objective and symbolic modes of violence via Slavoj Žižek. The analysis imperils the reliance of immigration, criminal justice and mental health systems on constructions of the interdependent identities of the untreatable biomedically mentally ill, and the unrehabilitatable inherently criminal and the undeserving foreign alien Other in order to rationalize deportation. The practices and technologies of evaluation and decision making used by professionals, police, lawyers and experts are questioned for their participation in the perpetuation of historical forms of colonial violence through the enforcement of racial and eugenic policies and laws in Canada. The historical developments of professional hegemonies, racial and eugenic laws, and direct professional practices at this confluence are interrogated for their complicity in the (re)making of the fantasy of the Canadian public, representing itself as just, fair and supportive while rationalizing violence at legislative, institutional, and professional levels. At the same time, notions of undesirability and exclusion based on race, class, ability, mental category, criminal history, or health status are reinforced. Opportunities for transformation of the identified colonial technologies and processes at the confluence of immigration, mental health and criminal justice systems are proposed through a denial of isolating individualistic identities, an appreciation of the hurtful advancement of colonial tropes and through connection to collective forms of resistance.

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