New Voices in Social Work

Qualitative Social Work Copyright ©2007 Sage Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, Vol. 6(4): 387–395 www.sagepublications.com DOI:10.1177/1473325007083352

EDITORIAL

New Voices in Social Work Writing Forms and Knowledge Production Stanley L Witkin University of Vermont, USA

Adrienne Chambon University of Toronto, Canada

STANLEY’S INTRODUCTION In 2001, I was asked by the editors of Qualitative Social Work (QSW) to write a brief piece that would introduce a new column called ‘New Voices’ to readers of the journal. According to the editors, the column would include: Articles by practitioners, dissertation and graduate students, academics at an early stage of their career, and marginal voices that have often been silenced. These may take the form of concise reviews, syntheses, reports or reflective analyses based on dissertations and theses completed or in process, conference papers or practice accounts.

I was invited for this task based on certain editorials I had written during my tenure as editor-in-chief of the journal, Social Work (see Witkin, 2000, 2001). These editorials expressed my interest in opening Social Work to a broader audience of writers and readers and to the ways – particularly through writing formats – that we keep people out. In my New Voices article (Witkin, 2002), I attempted first to flesh out some of the meanings of ‘voice’ as they might apply to this new column. Of 387

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the many definitions listed in my dictionary, I considered three as most germane: (1) voice as a form of expression, as in ‘to give voice to’, (2) voice as consideration; that is, something that is taken into account, that matters, for example, to have a voice in decisions, and (3) voice as representing a person, group or concept as, for example in phrases like, in her own voice, the voice of service users, or the voice of experience. Using these meanings – expression, consideration and representation – I hoped that QSW could ‘provide a space where people not ordinarily “heard” in professional journals [would] have an opportunity to present their “desires and opinions” to an audience that [would] take them seriously’ (Witkin, 2002: 142). I was particularly concerned about ‘marginal voices’ – those whose form of expression did not conform to the conventions of professional journals (and therefore were not heard), whose voices did not matter (for example, heard but dismissed), or who were represented by others (for example, professionals speaking for clients). Looking back, I am not sure how well QSW has attracted these voices or even whether an academic/professional journal is an appropriate forum for such aspirations. Certainly there is a need to expand the parameters of academic discourse; however, that does not necessarily mean that everyone will (or should) find the journal (or even the written word) an appealing or appropriate forum to express their ideas. Reflecting on my 2002 article, I believe my commitment to the values of multiplicity and inclusion led me to ask too much of the journal. Still, the general ideal of creating a space for new voices is laudable and I was quite pleased when in December 2005 the editors contacted me and proposed a special issue exploring aspects of the new voices theme. They also suggested – and I readily agreed – that I work with a co-editor who could bring additional perspective and richness to this project. I contacted Adrienne Chambon to see if she was interested in working with me on this project. Having participated with Adrienne for several years in the annual ‘transforming social work gatherings’ (see Witkin and Saleebey, 2007), I knew we could work well together. Most important, however, was that I admired Adrienne’s work related to this area (Chambon, 2005, 2007), her sensitivity to marginality and otherness, and the compatible, but different perspective she would bring to this project. Fortunately, she agreed to participate and after some email exchanges with Ian and Roy we came up with a title ‘New Voices in Social Work: Writing Forms and the Production of Knowledge’ and a ‘call for manuscripts’ that was published in the September 2006 issue.

ADRIENNE’S INTRODUCTION When Stan invited me to co-edit this issue, the request felt like a seamless one. Stan’s ‘Writing Social Work’ editorial (2000) had become a significant reference

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in my social work writings and in my teaching. The invitation resonated with several aspects of my work. As part of my autobiographical journey, I grew up in a diasporic space where multiple languages coexisted as so many voices. Today, I write using the languages that I have an affinity for. Yet, in the final version of a text, I regretfully adhere to the norm of a monolingual text, a way of speaking/writing/ thinking/wondering that departs singularly from the everyday. Working around the norm, I feel the need to incorporate such phrases and sounds that have intervened into the many drafts of the work into the final version. Writing becomes a vehicle for exploring and stretching ways of representing. The question of being ‘present’ in a text raises the question: which of the ‘I’s or which of the aspects of the ‘I’ do we foreground in each of our texts? As Judith Butler suggests, respecting the vulnerability and instability of our subjectivity shifts the ways in which we can expect to read and to write texts. Posing this realization as an ethical consideration, she then states: The recognition that one is, at every turn, not quite the same as how one presents oneself in the available discourse might imply, in turn, a certain patience with others that would suspend the demand that they be self-same at every moment. Suspending the demand for self-identity or, more particularly, for complete coherence seems to me to counter a certain ethical violence, which demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same. (Butler, 2005: 41–2)

Experimenting with different ‘scholarly’ voices, I try to include and awaken emotional, sensorial, experiential modes of reading (Chambon, 2005, 2007). I aim to hold on simultaneously to the dimensions of poetics and politics, though I may vary the genre or style of each text. I increasingly attempt the kind of writing that puts me at the edge of what I am aware of, and at the edge of a new naming (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997; Gendlin, 1962), striving for a kind of writing that serves the function of speaking out, to pick up on Foucault’s urging for ‘fearless speech’ (Foucault, 2001). My voice is inside the question, or stated differently, with ‘voice’ comes implication. This leads me to introduce the contributors’ writings in this issue as so many voices (in the plural); ways of voicing (as an action and an attempt that is never final); as an address that needs to remain somewhat open-ended to invite a response.

STANLEY CONTINUES As usual, I find Adrienne’s ideas and style of expression interesting and thoughtprovoking. Her autobiographical reflections provide a helpful, sense-making context for readers. It also invites me to write something similar. As Adrienne notes, we need to think of voice in the plural even in individuals lest we

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reproduce the singular, unitary self. Not only do we ‘speak’ in multiple voices, but each of these resound with the historical, cultural and social voices of others. Finally, I resonate with her views of writing as a medium for exploration and implication. I think of the phrase ‘poetic activist’ and Ken Gergen’s image for social scientists as ‘artisans of symbols’. How different might our knowledge and practices be if these were our guiding metaphors? Like Adrienne, I also reflect on the ways I interact with my own writing to discover/construct how I am thinking and to open new pathways of understanding. I think too of how others’ writings have affected me, and the thrill of hearing that something I wrote had an impact on someone else. Multilingualism and Voice

Adrienne’s struggle with her own multilingualism touches on another important issue germane to the focus of this issue. Social work has been slow to take up an interest in language and to explore its relationship to practice and research (e.g. Gregory and Holloway, 2005). Languages consist of systems of symbols and rules for their use (grammar).‘Language communities’ – groups within identifiable cultural and social contexts that share common vocabulary and language rules – may exist within or across natural languages. These communities are characterized by the frequent use of certain words (relative to people outside the community), for example, social workers’ use of ‘systems’ or ‘empowerment’; common words with unusual or even unique meanings, for example, social scientists’ use of ‘significance’, or postmodernists’ use of ‘text’; or even invented words, for example, ‘phallocentric’. They also may have their own variations of commonly accepted usages and syntax, such as using nouns as verbs, for example, ‘gendering’. These ‘semi-private’ languages have various functions (e.g. group cohesion, boundary maintenance) that may make it difficult for ‘outsiders’ to participate (have a voice) as legitimate members of the community. Professional journals like QSW function within language communities such as social work and academia. Having a voice in these communities (in the three senses of the word described earlier) requires knowing their vocabularies and adhering to their grammars and other rules of expression. Thus, those outside, or marginal to, these communities must become multilingual, not only, as is often the case, in natural languages, but in social work jargon and ‘academese’. This creates a contradiction; for to require ‘outsiders’ to learn and adopt the lexicon and grammar of the dominant language communities is to change their voice. As Morris (1996) writes about the experience of suffering: In a scholarly journal, discourse about suffering will normally take the form of twenty-five-page essays. There will be footnotes to contemporary thinkers, correct grammar, titles with colons. Obscenities and profanities will be expunged. Readers may notice that the essays place an invisible premium on

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intelligence, employ difficult or specialized diction, avoid familiar ideas, and strive to appear original. Methodist hymns, by contrast, treat suffering within a speech genre where almost none of the assumptions about scholarly essays apply. (Morris, 1996)

So how do we enable new voices without transforming them into ‘old’ ones? One way is by trying to create more permeable and expanded boundaries in these communities (as they exist within QSW) by encouraging multiple forms of expression, representation and accessible language. Such changes might encourage participation of people from other language communities such as those reflecting different social strata, ethnicities, and standpoints. It might also enrich social work’s understandings and practices and broaden its value position to include intellectual diversity. These are complex matters. As I write, I hear another voice cautioning me not to overreach as I did before in my expectations for the journal. The aim of this issue, with its focus on writing formats, is more modest than the statement in the previous paragraph. Even within this focus, the articles in this issue represent only a small example of the representational possibilities for the journal. Still, we think it is an important beginning. Like all of us, the authors in this issue traverse various language communities and use multiple voices. They find expression in the different writing formats represented: poetry, dialogue, narrative, and autoethnography. Additional voices appear by using formats that include spaces for those who are under-represented (see for example the article by Jennie Gray). What we hope (and believe) is that these communities and voices are more in evidence than is typical of QSW and other social work journals and that the messages they carry resonate in meaningful ways with readers.

THE ARTICLES In ‘To Know Me Now’, Heidi Pfau offers to us an autoethnographic account of the transformation over time of ‘layered truths’ that occurred as changing self-experiences and responses by others to her loss of sight. She shares the significance of loss including ‘tiny losses’, remembered exchanges and missed understandings. Her questions evolve as do the words she uses to express her positions. Heidi’s voices alternate between the textured description of the gravel under the cane and the staging of a rupture in a professional exchange that exposes assumptions held by seeing persons. Her inner dialogue circles around dense phrases expressed as a poem, ‘I am more than my vision’, a recurrent phrase she circles through in this document. Her text is multi-voiced in a temporal way as it includes the autoethnography she wrote several years ago and her reflections on that writing. Heidi uses these conversations with herself

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and others to rework her previous meanings. She concludes by an open-ended address: ‘I share with you my reader’ to which we are called to respond. Another kind of reflection is illustrated in Jennie Gray’s article ‘(Re)considering Voice’. Conducting research from a feminist reflexive perspective led her to invite research participants to reflect on their experience of the project. Their words no longer treated as evidence in response to the researcher’s queries, the participants shift from being objects of inquiry to becoming questioning subjects in the public eye. This ‘polyphonic text’, in which the voices of the participants and the researchers are formatted side by side, pulls the interlocutors and the readers as our eyes shift across the page fleetingly from one set of views to the other. This strain on reading embodies the movements of relating that held researchers and participants. This multi-voiced and multi-spaced text is an open territory for the reader who chooses then their itinerary, privileging at times one side, at times the other, more life-like although just as much constructed as any other text. The authors have invited an opening into meanings and positions – a reflective dialogue in which readers may also participate – that is significant and certainly more coherent than a summative exposition of their project. The storied nature of meaning is a focus of Rita Wilder Craig’s ‘A Day in the Life of a Hospital Social Worker’. Here is yet another type of voice, a storytelling voice whose words have been put down on paper. The story is about a social worker (herself ) trying to navigate a hospital system that has multiplied her responsibilities, particularly administrative tasks, and increased her caseload to such an extent that the pace of work is barely credible. Her narrative of the everyday in social work becomes a means of creating a space for breathing, for making sense of an increasingly depersonalizing, dehumanizing reality. The institution acts as a powerful filter through which the social worker’s narratives hold up. These narratives become a mirror of the quality of daily living that clients and workers in this context confront on a daily basis. Rita’s tone, at times humorous, deprecating, apparently factual, marks these narratives by a quality of the institutional absurdities that challenge our sympathies. Doing so, she brings to our attention our tacit acceptance of the apparent normality of what is often named as ‘the quality of life’ of the everyday. Concern with the physical body is taken up in a different way in Catherine Phillips’ ‘Untitled Moments: Theorizing Incorporeal Knowledge in Social Work Practice’. Catherine engages with the invisible yet tangible presence of ‘the absent physical body’ whose traces cry out to those left behind. As a new sequence from one of her practice and writing projects, she reflects on an intricate, generally avoided or denied, aspect of the personal and professional exposure to loss and trauma. Catherine has chosen the form of ‘performative writing’ to express the struggles with the impossibility of naming this complicated experience of an implied presence and absence. As she states,‘This

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paper is about finding a referent’. Her eloquent phrasing, repetitions and scansions stage the emotional upheaval these situations create in personal living and professional encounters. This narrative is doubled with Catherine’s theoretical voice that patiently lays out for the reader the context of these ideas from cultural theory. In order to expand our perception and mobilize our senses, she turns to the work of an artist. Readers are exposed to contemplating the difficulty in the task of living with the ‘imprints of loss on self and work’. Moving and challenging, Catherine’s inquiry inspires us to reflect in a deeper way on the concept of ‘incorporeal body’. Physicality of a different sort is explored in Megan Martin’s article, ‘Crossing the Line: Observations from East Detroit, Michigan USA’. Megan invites us into the puzzling reality of urban spaces, their modes of demarcation and group-specific borders. She takes us with her on a walk across the partitions that physically and symbolically divide the social space between two distinct neighborhoods. Although contiguous, the social chasm dividing these areas functions as a formidable barrier and disincentive for integration. Not being a resident of either neighborhood enables Megan to cross these boundaries and experience the different social worlds on either side of the divide. In the format of her narrative she reproduces ‘Alter Street’, the ‘imaginary’ physical border separating the neighborhoods. Using herself as an instrument for a coming-to-know, readers accompany Megan across the street and the social hiatus that discourages residents from co-mingling. Interestingly enough, while the experience was facilitated by a research project, the personal voicing of that wandering from side to side had until this day remained unstated in the reporting of the research, as far as we are told, an unexpected discovery of the field component of the project. Dialogical and poetic voices are explored in Stanley Witkin’s ‘Relational Poetry: Expressing Interweaving Realities’. This poetic form employs a conversational structure to explore the transformative possibilities of interpersonal dialogue. An original poem, in this case by Kenneth Gergen is responded to in a way that generates a third poem, encompassing more than either poem alone. Like people in dialogue, the poems become context for each other and in doing so generate a new supra-context. Although bounded by the lines on the page, we can imagine the dialogical movement continuing ad infinitum as the conversation is absorbed into others. The poetic form creates a slight estrangement from social work practice, yet this is dialogue in its most dense way, dialogue that gets at the heart of a thought, and through resonance at the heart of feelings. The voices dialoguing implicate the speakers with each other and with their theme. Social work is about transmission and transformation. This two-voiced poem invites us to inhabit and materialize relational possibilities. As readers, we can attempt to engage with the swirling texts and enter into the dance.

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Poetic forms are further explored by Martha Kuwee Kumsa in her two contributions: ‘Home and Exile’, and ‘The Space in-between’. An academic social worker, in a former life a journalist and political activist, the author brings to the fore one of her voices that coexists with the social work one but that is usually dampened by academic writing requirements, what one might call ‘the prison house of language’. She shares two texts, one is an open call, a cry out for her brother, that recalls the war situation and deadly strife in the life of human kind. The second text is an encounter with a representation of self (collective identity) as seen through the Other’s eyes. Written as a prose poem, it is a deeply troubling encounter that takes place in the world of art but can be brought to bear metaphorically onto social work situations. The voicing of identity/ies is at the heart of the two texts that formulate with passion the wounding that takes place in different contexts then/now, here/there, in a way that is not typically heard within professional texts. Fragments of language, shards of culture spring up in the texts as an intrinsic part of Martha’s act of voicing, and multiply the audiences of this address. Together, this collection represents a sample of possible writing formats for social work. Each calls upon and invites multiple voices, generating and representing different realities. The picture they create is never complete, but is constantly evolving into new patterns. The conversation continues. References

Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Chambon, A. (2005) ‘Practices of Art for Social Work’, Critical Social Work Journal 5(1), http://www.criticalsocialwork.com/ Chambon, A. (2007) ‘Art Works: Between Social Critique and Active Re-enchantment’, in D. Saleebey and S. L. Witkin (eds) Social Work Dialogues: Transforming the Canon in Inquiry, Practice, and Education, pp. 203–26. Alexandria, VA: Council of Social Work Education Publications. Cixous, H. and Calle-Gruber, M. (1997) Rootprints: Memories and Life Writing, trans. E. Prenowitz. London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2001) Fearless Speech: Michel Foucault, ed. J. Pearson. New York: Semiotext(e). Gendlin, E. (1962) Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective. New York: Free Press. Gregory, M. (2005) ‘Language and the Shaping of Social Work’, British Journal of Social Work 35(1): 37–53. Morris, D. B. (1996) ‘About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community. (How Literature Represents Suffering)’, Daedalus 125(1): 25(21), Expanded Academic ASAP (consulted July 2007). Witkin, S. L. (2000) ‘Writing Social Work: Editorial’, Social Work 45(5): 389–94. Witkin, S. L. (2001) ‘Reading Social Work: Editorial’, Social Work 45(1): 5–8.

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Witkin, S. L. (2002) ‘New Voices: A Column in Search of Authors’, Qualitative Social Work 1: 41–5. Witkin, S. L. and Saleebey, D. (2007) Social Work Dialogues: Transforming the Canon in Inquiry, Practice, and Education. Alexandria, VA: CSWE Publications.

Stanley L Witkin is a professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of Vermont. His interests include social construction, global social work education and transformative dialogue. Stanley is the former Editor-inChief of Social Work, the membership journal of the National Association of Social Workers (USA). He is the co-founder and director of the Global Partnership for Transformative Social Work (http://www.gptsw.net), a collective of social work academics and practitioners interested in exploring postmodern thought as it might inform or apply to social work education, practice and inquiry. His latest publication (edited with Dennis Saleebey), is Social Work Dialogues (2007, CSWE Press), a book of essays that addresses this theme.Address: Stanley Witkin, Department of Social Work, University of Vermont, 443 Waterman Building, Burlington, Vermont 05405, USA. [email: [email protected]]

Adrienne Chambon is Professor at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto. She currently coordinates the Social Justice & Diversity Specialization in the masters program, and teaches at the masters and PhD levels. Her scholarship revolves around immigration, refugees, and transnational processes; narrative & discourse in dialogue and social policy; postmodernism and critical theory (for example, she co-edited Reading Foucault for Social Work, 1999). Her most recent project has been ‘The Heuristics of Art Practices for Social Work’, which led to the development of an Arts & Social Work Research Initiative at the Faculty in Toronto, together with colleagues, community and arts partners. She is also an Advisory Board Member of the Global Partnership for Transformative Social Work (GPTSW). Address: Adrienne Chambon, Faculty of Social Work, 246 Bloor Street W, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1. [email: [email protected]]

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