Sally St. George

Drama in the Academy Bringing Racism to Light

The effort of our School of Social Work’s Diversity Committee to create an engaging presentation/performance focusing on the social issue of racism to our faculty and staff colleagues is described in this article. Our journey to develop two specific performances is outlined, along with descriptions of each and the audience reactions. As we reflected on our experiences with these performances, we recognized the value of using non-traditional forms of presentations in the academic setting to create a meaningful experience that would be most engaging with our academic colleagues. Developing these performances, enacting them, and receiving critical feedback on those performances emboldened us to develop additional performances (rather than traditional formal presentations) in our academic setting.

Researcher as Practitioner: Practitioner as Researcher

We will discuss ways in which clinical practitioners are perfectly positioned and adept at conducting research to examine the patterns across their caseloads and practices to produce immediate change. We use our experience with using Research As Daily Practice to focus on teaching students practices to creatively and integratively research and practice with families who present for therapy. By weaving the actions of research and practice together, practitioners develop broader understandings of, and movement toward, “just” change.

Family Therapy Stories: Stretching Customary Family Therapy Practices

We have created a collection of stories from our authors to provide another glimpse into ways that social injustices manifest themselves in daily interactions and events. The stories each have a different focus on transformation and/or social justice. We offer you stories of trying to explain social justice work in clinical practice, a supervisee’s emotional reaction, a student therapist’s own personal transformation through her professional preparation, the heartbreak of seeing and experiencing injustice inflicted by the helping profession, the complications and unfairnesses that occur when multiple helping systems do not coordinate, what possibilities emerge when there is a softening of the distinction between professionals and clients, and moving from seeing family problems appearing as internal to have external originations. Each story is then followed by a series of questions evoked by the story to help provide a pathway to continue to ponder issues of social justice/injustice in the therapeutic context.

Family Therapy + Social Justice + Daily Practices = Transforming Therapy

We explain our “equation” of adjusting family therapy clinical practices to include explicit talk of social justice issues (“unfairnesses”) experienced by our clients on a daily basis. We concentrate more on the everyday ways that injustices are enacted and experienced than on the macro-discourses of social injustices. This adjustment to see social injustice as behavioral and specific permits us to see injustice in action in everyday lives and affords us the opportunity to act locally and immediately. We advocate for and demonstrate expanding our usual activities of research and supervision to attend to social justice in order to help with transforming our therapeutic processes. These efforts can grow and be applied outside the therapy room, both by clients and their therapists. This chapter concludes with an articulation of our common purpose as authors in coming together to write this series and a brief introduction of each of the contributors/teams and their innovations.

Community-Minded Family Therapy

Therapy often focuses on the family in the room as the locus of change. While this can mobilize change efforts on the local level, this may inadvertently encourage people to solve their troubles by adjusting themselves to their life conditions, thereby propping up situations and contexts in their world that are hurtful and should not be supported. Noticing those societal discourses/influences that families enact, in both helpful and non-helpful ways, is our way of bringing the idea of community into therapy. Additionally, discussing the societal discourses as part of how to best live our lives can lead to initiatives on the part of our client families and ourselves to challenge those ideas not only in the therapy conversation, but also in our overall lives (at work, school, etc.). We offer suggestions about ways in which we can look at the extra-familial social levels and societal discourses in our therapeutic practices.

A Postmodern Critique of Societal Discourses of Male Violence in Interpersonal Family Relationships: A Balancing Act for Social Work

In recent years, treatments of family violence have tended to be built around conventional discourses suggesting that men are major initiators in instances of interpersonal violence. Utilizing a postmodernist analysis, we assess societal discourses that continue to give life to this narrow conceptualization of interpersonal violence. We also examine literature suggesting that both men and women resort to violence to resolve relationship difficulties and suggest that a more holistic and inclusive approach to understanding interpersonal violence is critical for social workers committed to social justice and a balanced understanding of the contextual nature of human problems.