Innocent Expertise: Subjectivity and Opportunities for Subversion within Community Practice

ABSTRACT

This article shines light on the tension-filled subjectivity of community practice, reflecting on the experiences of two community workers and our stories of how our whiteness functions in community practice—particularly when white workers engage with racialized community members. Through these stories, we seek to demonstrate how the white worker is framed as what we call an “innocent expert subject”; this subject is one that is both constituted through the authority of the systems we work within, and one which we construct through our own actions. Potential dangers of this subjectivity are then explored, as are opportunities for subversion. As we work toward negating the potential harms caused by this fraught subjectivity, it is our hope that possibilities for different kinds of community work, and different kinds of white community workers, can be realized.

KEYWORDS:

• Community practice
• subjectivity
• whiteness

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge Dr. Sarah Louise Todd for her continuous support in wading through the implications of how we approach our practice.