Gregory D. Gross

Gatekeeping for Cultural Competence: Ready or Not? Some Post and Modernist Doubts

Cultural competence, an axiomatic idea full of promise, struggles to meet its mission due to four handicapping conditions: the over-ambitiousness of the terms definition; the underrepresentation o...

Postmodern Social Work: No Truths Outside the Gates of Eden?

Postmodernism injects new life into practice at all levels and redefines the meaning of knowledge, diversity, and plain, old making sense. This rejuvenating theory offers additional means for understanding client systems, provides new techniques for helping, and promises a vital dialogue within the profession. Extolling the episodic, the unique, and the contradictory, postmodernists de-emphasize grand theory, logical patterns of thinking or doing, and general truths. In place of such traditionalist modernist notions, postmodernists elevate ideas and persons who reside at the margins, deconstruct client narratives, and help people re-write those narritives which fail to liberate the self, family, or community.

The Vanishing Military Veteran: A Postmodern Disappearance of the Hero

This article brings a postmodern philosophical perspective on the impact of U.S. media, cyber-technology, and the loss of the veteran hero in our current day American culture. Societal ambivalence, media depersonalization, and techno-war tactics along with the collusion of institutional under-responsiveness contribute to the metaphorical and real disappearance, or lack of recognition, and alienation of the veteran and his or her behavioral health needs. This phenomenon also speaks to the denial of community and governmental responsibility that in fact, we all as a society, share toward returning service members in helping them to reintegrate into civilian life with renewed sense of hope, health, dignity, and identity.

Deconstructing death: Toward a poetic remystification and all that jazz

Modernist citizens turn increasingly to social science and the popular press for answers about what once was the unfathomable nature of death and dying. Contemporary people have received an homogenized version of death and grief, replete with neatness, predictability and control, which in the end rob the grieving of meaning-making. Deconstruction of this death narrative occurs through the placement of two interrelated texts laid side by side; a personal narrative and a comedians routine, both interrupted randomly by poems submitted by students, combine to shatter that narrative, thus creating multiple, personalized, meaningful narratives.

Can Health Care Reform End Stigma Toward Mental Illness

ABSTRACT This article addresses the destigmatization of mental health through health care reform by incorporating antistigma efforts—a destaining of mental illness—through prevention and early intervention in community-based programs that would be mandated and funded through the auspices of Patient Protection and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Mental health care policies under the ACA and the Mental Health Parity Act are briefly described, following a definition of mental health stigma and its impacts. Recommendations for statutory mandates in stigma reduction at the community and federal levels and guidelines for mental health/behavioral health providers form the article’s conclusion.

Social Work: A Profession in Search of Sign Value or Positively Queen Jane

Unpacking social works low self-image and even lower social prestige reveals multiple layers of assumptions both within and outside the discipline that coalesce to construct a profession at odds with itself. Social work colludes with social forces which devalue its work while it presents a series of signs that reinforce the negative stereo-types associated with its practices. Social work projects little sign value, and what sign value it has tends toward the negative (e.g., weak, easy, common). This essay lays out two texts in parallel columns on the page. The right-hand side column “unpacks” via standard discourse while the left-hand side comments via a combination of real and imagined advertising slogans which both spoof and invite an unbranded professions search for its aesthetic, market niche. Recommendations include a reconstitution of BSW curricula, clarification of the practice continuum, regendering, relanguaging, and re-marketing.

Election 2016 Postscript: Blurred Realities and Why Liberals Lost

ABSTRACT Two professors of social work debate the dynamics of the 2016 presidential election sharing opposing views of President Obama’s message integrity and the electorate’s search for a candidate more “real.”

The Diversity of Fetishes/The Fetishes of Diversity

Aloha oy • Portnoy’s pate • One legged Lithuanian laborers stumping for Obama • White women drinking red wine/ red men drinking white women • Bigger Thomas graduating from furnace repair school • Inuit sealing: their fate? Yogurtmakers of Color • Women wounded in waiting/men wounded in wanting • Holocaust deniers and HIV defiers • LA women yearning for Yellowstone • Negotiations for rough trade and gentile commerce • Gaza stripped • Rushdie enforced hibernation • Brava, Ellen! Wailing walls • Chinese take-out students in the Square • Thelma & Louise: free but unliberated • Eminem & Elton: Together at last • Boy George: A great singer, too! This just outRock Hudson • Boat people in the Sea of Japan/raft families off Miami/ pirates along the Somali coast will soon be up a creek • The disco Casinos of Upstate NY • The Last of the Mohigans • Among Hmong • Italia (n ice) • Bat mitzvah Shadows in Palestine • Tawana • The promises of Gaugan: still life • The suburbs of Paris aflame • Making history: multiple millions of new voters for Roosevelt, Obama, and al-Maliki • Andalusian dogs • Beltway boys • Tibetan monks in tears • Venezuela crude • House of Rising Sons sinking at moonfall • Catholic school uniforms, plaid and pressed, and waiting for goyboy • Hasid • Purim curls gone straight • Why do I still long for Holly Woodlawn/Warhol prints • Kilts • Waterford – born of fire... And something else • Zimbabwe hunger • Con-go • Condoleezza!! West Virginia miners coughing black dust, stopping to ponder white privilege • American Sublime • August Wilson passed the December of his years • King Creole/ Creole King • Gumbo shrimp • Papago at the borderline • The elders of South Lakota • A shiver of regret in the sweathouse • The shock of recognition • Mohawk Air • Liliuokalani wants her house back • Ethnic cleansing in the ’08 prez-race: Thousands ask, Is America ready for a Mormon president? VP-elect Biden wonders, can Pakistani-Americans achieve their dreams in a post 7/11 world? And while we’re at it, how many feminists troubled their souls with this: Can we vote for a non-feminist woman even though she embodies the feminist manifesto: governs a state, beats the big boys, gets bi-weekly briefings on Russian troop movements, embraces differences (marries an Inuit, supports

The End of Justice and the Last Brand

Abstract Social work has begun to lose its handle on justice for two reasons: first, the profession has claimed its self-protective place among knowledge workers and second, because it has emptied the term “justice” of meaning. These developments find their parallel counterpart in the culture at large where justice has become trivialized within a liquid modernity found in the marketplace of television, the Internet, and the social.