Is Anti-Oppression Teaching in Canadian Social Work Classrooms a Form of Neo-Liberalism?

Abstract

This paper explores how the anti-oppression framework in the curriculum of schools of social work in Canada is co-opted into the neo-liberal and post-colonial structures of the wider society. First, the authors critically examine why an element of oppression either becomes essentialized as an autonomous site, that is, de-historicized, or understood in binary or dichotomous ways (i.e. black/white, gay/not gay) within the anti-oppressive framework. Second, the authors show how forms of safe knowledge are produced in the academy as faculty draw on their privileged social locations of teaching, while engaging in critical and progressive social change work that reflects their scholarship interest areas. Third, the authors suggest ways in which the anti-oppression framework itself can be challenged to make it a more viable and useful approach in social work classrooms.

Keywords:

• Anti-Oppression Teaching
• Essentialization
• Binaries
• Intersectionality
• Neo-Liberalism
• Social Location
• People of Colour Faculty

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer(s) for their insightful comments on this paper. Throughout the review process, the reviewer(s) did an exceptional job of challenging us to further reflect on our ideas and helped us to more fully substantiate our position.

Notes

^[1] We recognize the saliency of language and would like to acknowledge the contestations and tensions surrounding the terms ‘woman of colour’, ‘people of colour’ and ‘bodies of colour’. Nonetheless, we have consciously used this term to refer to those who are ‘not white’. For example, the difficulty in using the word ‘racialized’ to refer to those who are ‘not white’ is that the term may reinforce the invisibility that white people are also racialized into positions of privilege.

^[2] We acknowledge that although we are critiquing binary understandings, throughout the paper we rely on a binary of student and faculty. Despite the limitations of such constructions, we have chosen to use this binary as a means of interrogating the structural forces impacting these two groups and the resultant reactions of the majority of these constituencies. Our intention is not to homogenize the identities of either group, but to show the complexity and contradiction in struggling to be outside of the dominant, societal re-creations.