Healy, Chapter 9: From radical practice to AOP

• Liberal humanism


  Emphasizes and values the human capacity for individual agency
• Theories for practice


  • Systems
  • Problem solving
  • Strengths and solution-focused
• Critical and postmodern approaches to practice

  Require social workers to question liberal humanist notions of rationality, individual agency and the operation of power
• Critical social science paradigm

  • The world is divided between haves and have nots and that the interests of these groups are opposed and irreconcilable
  • The oppressed are encouraged to accept their oppressed status via dominant ideologies that present the current social order as just
  • Emphasis on empowering oppressed people to act collectively to achieve social change
• Radical social work


  Social workers should recognize that the origins of service users' problems lay primarily in unjust social structures rather than personal histories
• Critical consciousness raising


  A key practice strategy employed by radical social workers
• Radical egalitarianism


  Service providers should seek to minimize the power differentials between service workers and users
• Structural social work


  • Primarily concerned with analyzing and confronting structural injustices, particularly how the rich and powerful within society constrain and define the less powerful
• PCS analysis


  A three dimensional model of discrimination that describes the interaction across the personal or psychological, the cultural and the structural sources of oppression
• Levels of PCS analysis

  • Personal
  • Cultural
  • Structural
• Key principles of anti-oppressive practice (AOP)

  • Critical reflection on self in practice
  • Critical assessment of service users' experiences of oppression
  • Empowering service users
  • Working in partnership
  • Minimal intervention - social workers should aim to intervene in the least intrusive and oppressive ways possible