Negotiating Identities in the Context of Social Work Goals: The Case of an Intercultural Institutional Interaction

Abstract

We discuss the implications of identities constructed by an Afghan client in a conversation with her Dutch social worker. In this institutional interaction, the professional's dominant position is both underlined and mitigated, and there is room for topic initiation by the client as well. We singled out 2 crucial client identities that appear to produce diverging interpretations: (a) the fearful woman and (b) the shameful woman. The former is discussed at great length and is linked to the institutional agenda. The latter, however, does not seem to comply with the empowerment discourse currently present in Dutch social work. In spite of the social worker's attempts to reframe this identity, the client persists and relates her feelings of shame to her cultural background, which functions as an explanatory factor in the interaction. The enacted roles of both participants lay bare the social work tension of intervening in people's lives while taking into account the client's perspective and social work goals. Furthermore, this interaction is a good illustration of the way a migrant's identities are performed and negotiated in an encounter with a host country “other.”

Notes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the IGALA 4 Conference (2006).

1 The data were collected by Marleen van der Haar.

2 Indirect questions were excluded from the counting because we found in this case that such questions served different interactional functions but were not related to topic control in the way sequences of direct questions were. Examples of such indirect questions were when the client voiced possible criticism her fellow students had of her life, for instance, about her young age when she married or about the fact that she was divorced. These types of questions served different interactional functions than did the sequences we focus on here.

3 This sentence is a literal translation of the Dutch original, which is unintelligible.

4 The orthography “dohoe” illustrates the social worker's emphatic pronunciation of the verb to do.