Can discourse analysis enable reflective social work practice?

Abstract

This article explores the implications of discourse analysis for reflective social work practice. Because discourse analysis is itself embedded in discourse, we begin by placing contemporary discourse analysis within its post-modern and post-structuralist context. In t the second section we provide an analysis of humanism, as the dominant social work discourse, and black perspectives and feminism, as examples of alternative discourses. Alternative discourses deconstruct the knowledge claims of dominant discourses by exposing their Euro-centric and patriarchal assumptions. Under the scrutiny of post-modern analysis, however, even alternative discourses have been deconstructed, their own knowledge claims called into question. In the third section we consider the possibility that discourse analysis, if incorporated into social work training, might encourage reflective practice. Because of the deconstructive nature of discourse analysis, it can help place social workers in a ‘position of uncertainty’. This uncertainty may be threatening to professionals' conceptions of themselves. But to the extent that professionals can learn to accept and tolerate contingency, they might be able to assume a posture of openness that would, in turn, facilitate reflective practice.