Baines, Anti-Oppressive Practice

• Groups that called on social work to serve those in need while working to reorganize society

  • Rank and File Movement
  • Settlement House Movement
  • Canadian League for Social Reconstruction
• Politicized, transformative approaches to social work


  • Have a long history within the field of social work
  • Include education and consciousness raising among clients and co-workers
  • Development of social justice-based therapies
  • Community development and organizing
  • Political activism and workplace resistance
  • Broad-based organizing around policy changes, world peace, international equity and the development of social systems based on fairness and social justice
• Anti-Oppressive Practice (AOP)


  An umbrella term for a number of social justice-oriented approaches to social work including feminist, Marxist, critical postmodernist, Indigenous, critical poststructuralist, queer, critical constructionist, anti-colonial and anti-racist
• AOP does not claim to be an exclusive and authoritative model containing every answer to every social problem
• AOP is a set of politicized practices that continually evolve to analyze and address constantly changing social conditions and challenges
• Core themes of AOP

  • Macro- and micro-level social relations generate oppression
  • Everyday experience is shaped by multiple oppressions and resistance
  • Social work is a contested and highly political practice
  • Social work is not just a neutral, caring profession, but an active political process
  • Social justice oriented social work assists individuals while simultaneously seeking to transform society
  • Social work needs to build allies and work with movements
  • Social work's theoretical and practical development must be based on the struggles of the oppressed and marginalized
  • Participatory approaches are necessary between practitioners and clients
  • Self-reflexive practice and ongoing social analysis are essential components of AOP
  • A blended, heterodox social justice perspective provides the best potential for politicized, transformative SW practice
• Social workers participated in and led social justice directed organizations

  Late 1880s
• Social justice directed organizations

  • Rank and File Movement
  • Social Settlement Houses Movement
  • Canadian League for Social Reconstruction
• Bertha Reynolds


  Early social justice social worker and educator, member of the Rank and File and active socialist and communist who wrote several pivotal books describing egalitarian approaches to social work
• Structural social work

  Emphasizing the way that everyday problems are social in nature, shaped by social structures and relations interacting with individuals, their personalities, families and communities
• Social structures include patriarchy, racism, capitalism, heterosexism, transphobia, ageism and ableism
• In the 1990s and into the new millennium, social justice-oriented work shifted to anti-oppressive or critical social work, exploring a blending of critical postmodernism and intersectionist class analysis
• Postmodernism and poststructuralism offered ways of understanding multiple oppressions such as identity, social location, voice, diversity, borders, anti-essentialism, inclusion, exclusion and difference, while simultaneously emphasizing the importance of everyday experience
• Early work on overlapping oppressions

  • Heidi Hartman and others working from a Marxist feminist or socialist feminist perspective
  • Angela Davis and Patricia Hill Collins addressing class, race, and gender before postmodernism
• Questions AOP social workers ask

  • How do we provide resources to and act in solidarity with exploited and oppressed groups?
  • How do we nurture local leadership and encourage local and global social justice initiatives?
  • How do we sustain ourselves and our analyses in alienating and often unsympathetic environments?
  • How do we understand and work across multiple intersecting differences?
  • In building oppositional analyses and resistance, how do we draw on the voices of marginalized people and their everyday knowledge as well as on critical practice knowledge?
  • How can resistance strategies against unfair and inequitable policies and practices promote a clear political programme of change while remaining fluid and inclusive?
• Epistemology


  The theory or study of knowledge itself, including what is knowledge, how do we know what we know, and how is knowledge acquired
• Anti-oppressive theories all identify a central point in the form of a key oppressed group or groups who require liberation through the fundamental reorganization of social relations
• Postmodernism


  An epistemological theory about ways of knowing and how language and discourse exercise power, without a group of people it is trying to liberate
• Ontology


  The study of being, existence, or reality, which shapes the ways we understand and act in the world
• The overwhelming majority of social workers are employed in the larger state apparatus and by implication work for the state
• Structural analysis of the state


  The government and the state reflect and extend the interests of dominant groups while attempting to appear neutral and even-handed
• Postmodernists and poststructuralists have not developed a comprehensive theory of the state per se and do not tend to view the state as having a pivotal or central role in social life
• Marxist, feminist, or structuralist analysis of the state


  The state is seen as a set of processes that can assist oppressed population interests and even remove the cause of their maltreatment, though it can also sustain and extend oppression
• Most state-sponsored welfare programs meet the needs of the business sector by ensuring an endless supply of cheap labor, rather than addressing the poverty caused by a system driven by profit
• Mainstream social work draws on theories that see social and economic systems as politically neutral and fail to recognize serious inequities in society or how they are embedded in the profit model of capitalism
• Mainstream social work tends to view social problems in a depoliticized way that emphasizes individual shortcomings, pathology, and inadequacy
• Social work has been depoliticized and remade as a neutral profession, when in reality it is a series of acute, ongoing, political struggles
• Mainstream social work promotes the idea that social work is a united, apolitical body of expert knowledge, when in reality it is a number of distinct, disparate and intensely political bodies of knowledge
• Terms like "First Nations", "Native", "Indigenous", "Aboriginal", and words in Indigenous languages are not neutral, but reflect changing relationships among service users, governments and markets, emphasizing individual rather than social or governmental responsibility
• Terms surrounding (dis)ability are also hotly contested, with different advocates preferring different terminology to highlight social construction and humanity