Write a critical reflection on the theoretical approach/es you will bring to social work practice. Ensure that you include consideration of:
● The theories/models discussed in the readings from this course.
● The values of social work practice, including working in collaboration and
partnership with communities and people using services.
● The influence of your own social position, including experiences of power
and privilege.
The readings include critical analyses and critiques on trauma informed approaches, specifically in the context of violence, abuse, and oppression. When reading, consider whether social work should 'go beyond' trauma informed approaches.
Please use reading provided on the attachments.
Trauma and resistance: ‘hang time’ and other innovative responses to oppression, violence and suffering © 2020 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice Accompanying podcasts for Journal of Family Therapy, Volume 42, Issue 3 are available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbl3imeXy60&feature=youtu.be Journal of Family Therapy (2020) 42: 347–364 doi: 10.1111/1467-6427.12293 Trauma and resistance: ‘hang time’ and other innovative responses to oppression, violence and suffering Vikki Reynolds This article presents alternative ways to respond to events understood as ‘traumatic’ in most psychological contexts. It questions the medicalisation and individualisation of persons’ resistance against harms, especially violence and structural oppressions, as criteria of mental illness and trauma. I present activist-informed approaches to suffering and oppression that are centred on witnessing acts of resistance. This work comes from my ethical stance for justice-doing and responding to colonisation with accountability as a white settler practitioner. Witnessing requires that we situate personal suffering in its sociopolitical context and resist the individualisation and medicalisation of suffering. Activist practices of witnessing include the duty of the witness to work to change the social contexts of oppression, addressing power both personally and structurally, and working towards co-creating a just society. Practitioner points • Resistance to suffering and oppression is always present as persons al- ways act to guard their dignity and move towards safety • Justice-doing and a decolonising stance for the work is required to resist psychology’s neutrality and objectivity that obscure contexts of structural oppression • A witnessing stance from direct action activism is useful in making space for resistance • The practitioner’s responsibility is to move beyond witnessing to cre- ate social change and address contexts of injustice and limited life choices that are the frame for suffering Keywords: trauma; resistance; witnessing; direct action activism; oppression; suffering This article presents activist-informed ways of responding to suffering in persons who have been oppressed and harmed. This approach centres on witnessing their prudent and creative acts of resistance (Reynolds et al., 2014; Reynolds, 2010). A witnessing approach requires that we situate personal suffering in its sociopolitical context and resist the individualisation and medicalisation of suffering. Activist practices City University of Seattle, Vancouver, Canada 14676427, 2020, 3, D ow nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w iley.com /doi/10.1111/1467-6427.12293 by Federation U niversity of A ustralia, W iley O nline L ibrary on [21/10/2022]. See the T erm s and C onditions (https://onlinelibrary.w iley.com /term s-and-conditions) on W iley O nline L ibrary for rules of use; O A articles are governed by the applicable C reative C om m ons L icense https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9208-6918 mailto: 348 Vikki Reynolds © 2020 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice of witnessing are enacted through an ethical stance for justice-doing, which includes the duty of the witness to work to change the social con- texts of oppression, and engage a true reckoning with power (Reynolds and polanco, 2012). To foreground the practice of witnessing acts of resistance (as op- posed to assessing, diagnosing, and treating trauma symptomology), I share a compilation of stories from working with youth who have given me permission to share their experiences. The stories from practice shared below contain threads from various young people’s stories; I have woven these threads together in order to structure safety for youth who are indeed co-creators of this work, and to make the practice clearer. This requires holding a tension between acknowledging youth wisdom and necessarily protecting identifying details. Decolonising practice and justice-doing As an activist and therapist, I work to bridge the worlds of social jus- tice activism with community work (Reynolds, 2019; Reynolds and Hammoud-Beckett, 2018). My people are Irish, Newfoundland, and English folk, and I am a white settler with heterosexual and cisgender privilege. I am still immersed in the ongoing work of unsettling myself as a white settler (Regan, 2010), despite my commitment to be decolo- nising in all of my paid and unpaid work. Decolonising practice is not a metaphor (Tuck and Yang, 2012); it means commitments to Indigenous governance and land return. In all my activism, community work, and organising, I aim to be directed by Indigenous people (Manuel and Derrickson, 2015). As a settler I have set intentions to stay implicated in the ongoing catastrophes (Kouri and Skott-Myers, 2016) of colonisation and genocide (Brave Heart and DeBruyn, 1998). I am informed by Metis trauma counsellor/researcher/ activist Natalie Clark (2016) who writes of trauma as the ‘new colonial frontier’. As an adjunct professor and therapeutic supervisor, I resist in- terpreting Indigenous resistance to ongoing colonisation and state vio- lence as a symptom of trauma, a therapeutic act of harm that response based practitioners Nick Todd and Allan Wade (1994) name with the ne- ologism ‘psycolonization’. In The wretched of the earth (1963) Frantz Fanon wrote specifically of the psychopathology of colonisation directly related to France’s use of political terrorism and widespread torture to supress the Algerian struggle for independence. Fanon proposes that psychology as a euro-centric colonising force is used to pathologise the colonised, but that we should centre our inquiry on the mental unwellness of the 14676427, 2020, 3, D ow nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w iley.com /doi/10.1111/1467-6427.12293 by Federation U niversity of A ustralia, W iley O nline L ibrary on [21/10/2022]. See the T erm s and C onditions (https://onlinelibrary.w iley.com /term s-and-conditions) on W iley O nline L ibrary for rules of use; O A articles are governed by the applicable C reative C om m ons L icense Trauma and resistance 349 © 2020 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice coloniser. Fanon’s teachings were absent from all twenty-seven years of my education, and I am confident that erasure was connected to white su- premacy, anti-black racism in the academy, and to silencing diverse voices of dissent. Here I am informed by black American therapist Makungu Akinyela (2002, 2014) and Travis Heath (2018) and their work to decol- onise from a black, anti-colonial perspective addressing the soul wound (Duran, 2006) of slavery (Hardy, 2017b). As a white settler therapist, I am inextricably related to the project of psychology that systematically psy- colonises Indigenous people; I cannot distance myself from these prac- tices, but must continue to resist them in practice and theorising. This practice also requires justice-doing. Justice-doing goes beyond the scope of anti-oppressive practice, which aims to not replicate op- pression, but entails actually being just and ethical with people, which requires engaging the activist project to transform the social contexts in which suffering and oppression occur, and to do this in ways led by persons and with accountability to their communities. One reflexive question I continually puzzle with is: ‘How am I attending to power in this moment, in this interaction, with this person?’ This work is an anti-perfection project in part because we have not delivered on a just society. The practice of engaging in a purposefully messy and imperfect process (Reynolds, 2014) is informed by queer theory (Butler, 1990), critical trans theory (Spade, 2011), and anti-au- thoritarian social justice activism (Buechler, 2005; Chomsky, 2005; Shantz, 2011), where we aim to respond immediately to all oppressive and abusive acts. It requires that we take overt positions for justice-do- ing, defy neutrality, and have the moral courage to face up to and repair the consequences of imperfect actions. As scholars and cultures of resistance teach, we must continually and fluidly attend to the intersections of domains of identity connected to both power and disadvantage (Crenshaw, 1995). This practice is in- formed by women of colour feminism (Smith, 2006), in particular black feminists such as bell hooks (1984), and Patricia Hill Collins (1998). Ideas of diversity and inclusion, although useful, are also limiting and are being problematised and transformed by communities of resistance and by activists with marginalised voices (Ahmed, 2012). The structural inequities that promote suffering demand complex collective responses. Trauma: psychology language that obscures more than it reveals Trauma, as conceptualised and defined by the mainstream field of psychology, is a medicalised term that obscures violence and human 14676427, 2020, 3, D ow nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w iley.com /doi/10.1111/1467-6427.12293 by Federation U niversity of A ustralia, W iley O nline L ibrary on [21/10/2022]. See the T erm s and C onditions (https://onlinelibrary.w iley.com /term s-and-conditions) on W iley O nline L ibrary for rules of use; O A articles are governed by the applicable C reative C om m ons L icense 350 Vikki Reynolds © 2020 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice suffering (Bracken, Giller and Summerfield, 1995; Summerfield, 2001, 2004). The language of psychology centres on descriptions of individ- uals’ brokenness which hides the structural violence that promotes suf- fering. Legislative poverty, ableism, developer-created homelessness, ongoing colonial violence, racism, anti-black racism (Hardy, 2017a), white supremacy, the prison industrial complex (Maynard, 2017), cis- normativity, heteronormativity, and rape culture – specifically, the structural state violence that fosters the murder and disappearance of Indigenous women that is tied to the rape of the earth through resource extraction and enacting ongoing colonisation (Hunt, 2016) – all of these forms of structural violence are excluded from and concealed by psychological conceptualisations of trauma. A complex analysis helps us resist the psychological project, which reduces political and structural violence to personal deficiency (de Finney et al., 2018a): the perfect storm of victim-blaming. Here I am accompanied by many scholar-practitioners who have of- fered well-considered critiques of the language of trauma (Strong and Busch, 2013; Sutherland et al., 2016; Allan Wade, personal communi- cation). Specifically, how it locates our interest as workers in symptoms and diagnoses that are personalised, individuated, and constructed as the responsibility of the person, as if their personal strengths or resil- iency are the issue, and as if the material world of power and oppression can be mitigated by neutrality and objectivity. Persons share complex stories and experiences from their lives, in which there is suffering, hardship, resistance, and responses that are in- sightful and intelligent. Practitioners too often side with psychocentrism (Defehr, 2016), reducing this complexity to simplicity, redefining people’s complex responses and acts of resistance to fit narrowly defined categories of trauma criteria and symptomology. This moves the focus from a per- son’s autonomous responses and unique acts of resistance to professional assessment and psychological templates of mental wellness