Recognition, Resources, Responsibilities: Using Students' Stories of Family to Renew the South African Social Work Curriculum

Abstract

This PhD project aims to demonstrate the importance of giving space to local student voices as forms of subjugated knowledges to inform the curriculum on Family and Child Care. It does so by reflecting upon the process and product of critical autobiographical assignments which social work students at the University of the Western Cape, an historically black university in South Africa, undertake on their own families. In so doing it provides on-the-ground information about students' family circumstances. Social work is purportedly a profession that challenges inequalities and social exclusion. It therefore seems pertinent to examine the issues of privilege, inequality and subjugation in relation to issues of the social work curriculum. The family stories which students wrote in their assignments are analysed in terms of how privileges and disadvantages in relation to race, gender and age have affected students' and family members' ability to flourish as human beings. The students' stories of cultural racism which they and their family members were exposed are analysed as an instance of misrecognition, and stories of institutional racism are analysed from a human capabilities perspective. The responses to these forms of racism by students and their family members are also reported on. Furthermore, gender and generation are examined in terms of the responsibilities that students and their family members undertook to care for each other. Responsibilities include cooking, cleaning, care-giving in relation to dependents, and acquiring resources for family members through paid employment. Students stories revealed that the way in which students and their family members were recognised or misrecognised, and the access they had to resources depended on their gender and generational positioning in the household. The purpose of this study is to examine the insights which emerge from these accounts of privilege and disadvantage in order to renew the social work curriculum. Important areas for consideration in the curriculum which emerge from the analysis of students' stories include questioning the assumed usefulness of systems theories for social work, the inclusion of the concept of (mis)recognition, the human capabilities approach, the political ethics of care, participatory action research, and including students as co-constructors rather than consumers of the curriculum