Moving the Boundaries of Feminist Social Work Education with Disabled People in the Neoliberal Era more

This article was downloaded by: [Karen Soldatic] On: 30 January 2012, At: 05:48 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Social Work Education: The International Journal Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cswe20 Moving the Boundaries of Feminist Social Work Education with Disabled People in the Neoliberal Era Karen Soldatic & Helen Meekosha a b a b Curtin University, Australia University of New South Wales, Australia Available online: 30 Jan 2012 To cite this article: Karen Soldatic & Helen Meekosha (2012): Moving the Boundaries of Feminist Social Work Education with Disabled People in the Neoliberal Era, Social Work Education: The International Journal, 31:2, 246-252 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2012.644975 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. 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The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Social Work Education Vol. 31, No. 2, March 2012, pp. 246–252 IDEAS IN ACTION Moving the Boundaries of Feminist Social Work Education with Disabled People in the Neoliberal Era Downloaded by [Karen Soldatic] at 05:48 30 January 2012 Karen Soldatic & Helen Meekosha Until recently social work education in Australia has either marginalised or neglected disability by omission. Given the increasing number of disabled people in the community, the teaching of social work within a disability studies emancipatory paradigm as an essential part of the curriculum is long overdue. As many social work educators have suggested, we are at a critical moment in Australia, where the policy environment in which social work is embedded has largely been reframed in line with neoliberal trends. For disabled people, this has meant an ongoing state campaign to diminish disability entitlements, from decreasing disability social security regimes through to the rationalisation of adult disability support and care schemes. Social workers are negotiating the competing demands of these policy constraints alongside the needs of the disabled people they work with. New moral dilemmas have emerged where they are actively faced with the question of ‘who to serve?’. Keywords: Disability; Neoliberalism; Feminism; Ethic of Care; Affective Equality In this paper, we suggest that emerging discourses within the realm of affective equality can provide one possible avenue to expand social workers’ practice to encourage enabling practices under Australian neoliberal welfare-to-work regimes. These new debates around inequality and equality that have recently emerged show the structural Karen Soldatic, Curtin University, Australia; Helen Meekosha, University of New South Wales, Australia Correspondence to: Karen Soldatic, Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. Email: k.soldatic@curtin.edu.au ISSN 0261-5479 print/1470-1227 online q 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2012.644975 Social Work Education 247 relationship of power in which social workers are embedded. They effectively capture and demonstrate the complexity of the relationship between care receivers and caregivers. As Lynch et al. suggest, affective inequality is ‘concerned with providing and sustaining relationships of love, care and solidarity’ (2009, p. 3). The politics of solidarity that builds relationships of trust, care and love between social workers and disabled people forced into welfare-to-work regimes may provide a window through which social workers can shift their dispositional framing to locate their practice of social work within disability rights. Social Work Education in Australia: Including Disability in the Neoliberal Era? Although higher education has improved in providing accommodations and services to students with disabilities, it has lagged very far behind in recognizing and incorporating disability across the curriculum. The question remains: Is this simply neglect, or is there something inherent in the way diversity is considered that makes it impossible to recognize disability as a valid human identity? (Davis, 2011) Downloaded by [Karen Soldatic] at 05:48 30 January 2012 Lennard Davis, a leading scholar in the field of disability studies, recently suggested that despite the ongoing developments within higher education to be more inclusive of issues surrounding the broader ‘category’ of diversity, the inclusion of disability has remained absent from these trends. We suggest that Davis’s insights are highly pertinent to Australian social work education. In attempting to locate core or elective curriculum subjects in the area, disability is present by its overwhelming absence. As Roulstone (2011) reflected in the UK situation, this is a curious oversight, given that impairment and disability encompass a large segment of the population, which in Australia is close to 20% of the overall population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009). Despite contemporary social work education in Australia being increasingly informed by critical theories (see Briskman et al., 2009), there is little space given to disability within the university curriculum (Meekosha and Dowse, 2007). As Briskman et al. (2009) lay out in the opening chapters of their leading social work education text for Australian universities, we are at a critical moment in social work education, not only due to the ongoing inclusion of issues of ‘diversity’ at a broad level but also, most significantly, because practice in the field is increasingly constrained by the dominance of neoliberal policies in nearly all areas of Australian social life. Briskman et al.’s position largely concurs with Dominelli’s (2007) arguments that the rise of neoliberal social policy regimes has resulted in significant constraints for social workers. These authors have all noted the ways in which the complex interplay of layers of legislation, government policy and organisational context largely shape the levels of discretion shown by social workers when working the ‘front lines’. These broader structural constraints, as Herz and Johansson have posited, now require us ‘to start discussing, analysing and dealing with this changing social landscape’ (2011, p. 28) in ways that can move social workers from being ‘mere technicians’ to active and critical reflective agents. Herz and Johansson note that within this new environment, too often the field is bogged down in psychologising and 248 K. Soldatic & H. Meekosha Downloaded by [Karen Soldatic] at 05:48 30 January 2012 pathologising ‘client behaviour’ rather than situating the people that they work with within these broader structural constraints. This argument is particularly salient when reflecting upon the neoliberal social policy turn in Australia (see Soldatic and Pini, 2009), where access to disability social security benefits and other vital social entitlements, including the provision of adult care supports, is granted only on a very narrow definition of disability which is tied to a work test (Grover and Soldatic, forthcoming). In Australia, social workers often play a key role in determining ‘disability status’ (Meekosha and Dowse, 2007) and, therefore, have the power to either deny or enable disabled people access to the necessary supports and services that enable participation and inclusion (Soldatic, 2010). This broader policy context of social work practice raises some key questions about the purported ‘critical turn’ in social work education in the Australian university curriculum and whether this can build an enabling social work practice that recognises the validity of maintaining a ‘disability identity’ despite the push by neoliberal governments to dismiss its relevance. One of these questions is, how can social work education in the Australian university environment promote enabling discourses and practices of disability rights even within these broader structural constraints? The ‘Feminist Turn’ in Australian Social Work Education: An Enabling Practice? Within the Australian university social work curriculum, one of the key challenges to neoliberalism has been the engagement with critical theories to inform social work education. Critical theories recognise issues of agency alongside socio-political structural locations of disability, race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality and indigeneity (Briskman et al., 2009, p. 3). Emerging out of these discourses has been a burgeoning body of work within a feminist frame (see Morley, 2009), where the feminist ethic of care has become a prevailing discourse. It has become a prominent theme in the Australian social work curriculum, not only because of the dominance of women in the field (both as educators and as practitioners), but also because it is one of the few theories that seek to acknowledge that relationships of ‘care’ and ‘support’ are largely ones of inter-dependence. Both the social worker and the ‘client’ are embedded in structural relations of power but, despite these limitations, there is room to build relationships of care and support that encourage individual agency, reflexive evaluation and, most importantly, critical self-reflection. Thus, the positioning of a feminist ethic of care within the social work curriculum is a deliberate political act that seeks to encourage a dispositional transformation within students, where new professionals entering the field move from being bound by the utilities of ‘duties and responsibilities’ to a relational contextual practice of responsiveness and reciprocity (Gray, 2010, p. 1794). The promise of a critical feminist social work practice facilitating individual autonomy and the realisation of individual rights is a significant proposition for disabled people (Johnson, 2009, p. 188). Issues of autonomy, rights and justice are critical concerns (Meekosha, 2010) and within the social worker– disabled client Social Work Education 249 relationship, disabled people’s rights and autonomy have too often been overlooked (Oliver and Sapey, 2006). A primary site of struggle for disabled people has been, and largely remains, their socio-political relational positioning in help, support and care (Soldatic and Meekosha, 2012). Despite its promises for bridging the historical divide between social workers and disabled people, within the Australian context, the neoliberal policy environment draws upon an ‘ethic of care’ to prioritise ‘care’ above a deepening of a disability citizenship that encompasses rights, freedoms and autonomy (Soldatic and Meekosha, 2012). As an example, the Australian carers’ movement has gained prominence within the social policy environment and, in turn, has been granted formal recognition, such as the Carers Recognition Act (2004) in Western Australia. While carers should be recognised for their work in providing informal care and support to many disabled people who are waiting for their situation to be ‘critical enough’ to gain access to vital in-home and out-of-home supports, too frequently carers’ rights are being propelled above those of disabled people. The growing prominence of carers’ rights movements above disability rights movements in Australia has effectively ‘enabled’ the state to maintain the old public– private divide that feminists have long tried to dispel in citizenship regimes, that is, disabled people’s right to support remains privatised within the household and largely reliant upon the informal support of unpaid carers who are largely women (Galvin, 2004). In Australia, this is most evident when we consider the persistent withdrawal of disability social security benefits from a large group of people, while carer-based programmes such as short-term ‘respite’ are being expanded (Soldatic and Meekosha, 2012). Too often these rights and the redistribution of resources via public policy measures that respond to carers’ demands for support to facilitate their informal care within the household have been won through the discursive positioning of disabled people as a burden. A recent and ongoing example is the Walk a Mile in My Shoes campaign in Australia (Working Carers Gateway, 2005). Under this campaign, carers across the country continually lobby for greater public resources to support the ‘caring for’ of their disabled family member within the private realm. Further, carers, drawing on the neoliberal dominance of economics, argue that their unpaid labour saves the nationstate millions of dollars (see Soldatic and Chapman, 2010). The campaign feeds into both the neoliberal tendency of winding back disability benefits and entitlements, and of privatising ‘relationships of care’ within the household, while simultaneously positioning disabled people as burdens either to the nation-state or to carers themselves. Given the way it appears to position one groups’ rights and claims against another group—carers versus disabled people—under neoliberal policy regimes, the feminist turn to the ethic of care within Australian social work education has the potential to be as divisive, denigrating and disabling for disabled people as it predecessors. This is, of course, consistent with disability rights’ historical concerns with the discursive positioning of ‘care’, which has been highly problematic for disabled people (Morris, 1997). Downloaded by [Karen Soldatic] at 05:48 30 January 2012 250 K. Soldatic & H. Meekosha Love, Care and Solidarity: Expanding the Realm of Disability Inequality in Social Work Education Building on the trend towards a feminist ethic of care has been the recent scholarship on affective (in)equality. While not as yet widely adopted by social work educators, as Lynch et al. (2009, p. 3) suggest, affective equality is directly linked to broader macrostructural theories of inequality, such as the work of Rawls (1971) and Nussbaum (2007), as it seeks to position some of feminism’s key concerns around ‘care’ at the centre of these broader debates. In light of this, Lynch et al. argue that there are not just the three pillars of structural inequality, but four: economic, political, socio-cultural and affective inequality. This fourth pillar, ‘affective inequality’, we suggest, should resonate strongly for social work educators who are part of, or aligned with, the disability rights movement for at least two reasons. One of the movement’s core concerns is how disabled people have largely remained powerless, despite the enduring struggles within this realm, in negotiating relationships of help, care and support (Galvin, 2004). As identified earlier, this is due to the complex mix of the broader macro policy environment with the neoliberal turn, the organisational context whose regulations and unwritten rules disabled people are required to negotiate to gain and maintain access to specialist services, and the ideologies and attitudes of front-line social workers who assess and determine access to various supports and service. Too often disabled people are required to feel, show and demonstrate a high level of gratitude for the little help, care and support that they are theoretically entitled to receive [see Galvin (2004) for a full discussion of this point]. This disabling performance, in many instances, is a necessary one if disabled people wish to maintain access to vital services and supports (Soldatic and Meekosha, forthcoming). Affective equality suggests that, unlike its sister, the feminist ethic of care, issues in relation to affective (in)equality are structurally based. While maintaining a position of advantage over the ‘care recipient’, the providers of help, care and support are, in effect, also embedded in a structural location of affective inequality. Primarily, this is because the workers in such environments are unable to fully realise relationships of equality with their ‘clients’ due to the broader structural constraints in which they are embedded. Affective equality recognises that social workers, while appearing to bear the markers of power as they assess and determine disability entitlements and benefits, are in effect hampered by their structural location. While this may appear initially as simply compliant behaviour on behalf of the social worker, this inequality is not only about their position of power, but in itself is disempowering as it diminishes social work professionals’ discretion at the front line (MacDonald and Marston, 2006). Such an awareness offers the opportunity to create solidarity between social workers and their disabled ‘clients’, so that social workers can actively seek to alter the harshest effects of neoliberal public and market policies. Understanding their own location of structural inequality enables social workers to reflexively evaluate their own privileges and disadvantages, and to consider new dimensions of love, care and solidarity in support for the disabled people with whom they work. Downloaded by [Karen Soldatic] at 05:48 30 January 2012 Social Work Education 251 Conclusion There are consequences in the way the social work curriculum is structured and taught. We have argued that a major lacunae still remains; that of disability. The absence of the new perspectives emerging from disabled people themselves and of the scholarly work in critical disability studies reduces the learning experience of social work students. Social work practice with the marginalised populations of disabled people needs to tackle not only the day-to-day practical problems but also the broader social processes affecting their lives. Practitioners need to ‘do’ theory alongside practice. Connell terms this the ‘ontoformativity of social practice’ (2011, p. 4). We are suggesting the politics of the caring relationship between social workers and disabled people be seen more usefully through the lens of affective inequality. This will necessarily include rethinking the way early generations of social workers have engaged with disabled people. Social workers, in the learning environment, must engage in thinking about the ontoformativity of social practice, that is, in the case of disability, the way social work practice brings social order into existence over time. The consequences of social work practice with disabled people bring new realities, which may be full of promise and emancipation or may be disastrous. We are optimistic that the former will be the case. Downloaded by [Karen Soldatic] at 05:48 30 January 2012 References Australian Bureau of Statistics (2009) Disability, Australia, 2009, cat. no. 4446.0, ABS, Canberra. Briskman, L., Pease, B. & Allan, J. (2009) ‘Introducing critical theories for social work in a neo-liberal context’, in Critical Social Work, eds J. Allan, L. Briskman & B. Pease, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Connell, R. (2011) Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Davis, L. J. 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