Social work education : critical imperatives for social change.

Abstract

Hegemonic discourses and ideologies of social work in South Africa, arose from the racist capitalism of colonialism and apartheid. Imperatives for social justice and social change therefore require that social work education reflect on and develop discourses of radical and critical knowledge and practice. The main aim of the study was to explore the extent to which South African social work knowledge and education, as reflected in various formal and narrative discourses, meets critical imperatives for social change and transformation. The study was qualitative in nature, using a depth-hermeneutic approach, with various interrelated, coherent empirical processes. These include reviewing extant theory to contribute to a framework of knowledge and practice constitutive of social change, conducting a politically engaged, critical thematic analysis of social work discourse constitutive of social change, as reflected historically in a selection of formal South African social work texts and in the narratives from group conversations among South African social work educators. Early South African social work knowledge and practice had emerged from the ‘social hygiene’ and eugenics movement, but later, Afrikaner nationalist ideology and liberal and racist capitalism shaped social work. In postapartheid South Africa, discourses of social development and reform within a free market rational economy; ideologies of liberalism and capitalism as solutions to structural social problems, neo-liberal discourses of individual responsibility and valorisation of agency, social control and regulation, are prevalent. Social work knowledge and practice consistently supported hegemonic ideologies of the state. Throughout the history of social work however, there was evidence of counterhegemonic, radical and critical discourse, albeit suppressed and hidden. Knowledge and practice constitutive of social change can be positioned on a continuum from oppressive, domesticating and colonizing knowledge and practice, to coercion and status quo maintenance, to institutional and societal reformist knowledge and practice; to transformational and critical knowledge and practice; and to radical and revolutionary knowledge and practice.