The Advocate Self of(f) Beaten Paths: Travelling Colonial Roads in Neoliberal Times

Social work often conceptualizes advocacy as synonymous with social justice and critical praxis (Smith, 2011), which seemingly affirms the heart of the social work profession. Though many claim an advocacy role or agree that advocacy is essential to social works cause, little is known about how the advocate self is constructed, understood, and practiced. 6 self-defined, Ontario-based child and youth advocates were interviewed in this study to explore how they engage in their own self-making processes; specifically advocates for children and youth who are involved in the child welfare system.
This research is informed by post-structural, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and other critical theories and worldviews. It deploys a narrative approach and an analytic framework of Foucauldian discourse analysis to explore how child and youth advocates are shaped by, and in turn, shape dominant relations of power that work against, or in solidarity with children and young people towards social justice. Findings reveal that the roads travelled by child and youth advocates in their self-making processes are complex and ever-changing. The narratives of child and youth advocates reveal that they are both co-producers and disrupters of dominant discourses and power-knowledge systems. Additionally, it is argued that the advocate self is not a bounded self, but that it is “discursively mediated and politically situated” (Macias, 2012 p. 10). Finally, the research concludes with an argument for the necessity to historicize social justice imperatives in order to gain insight to the current tensions experienced by social justice advocates and further, opportunities for resistance.