Multiple Visions Research Articles

Early Conflicts in Social Work Education

This article explores early conflicts in the creation of professional education for social workers in the nation's first three schools of social work‐the New York School of Philanthropy, the Boston School for Social Workers, and the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. As social workers advocated a shift from on‐the‐job training to systematic professional preparation in the early twentieth century, leaders in the nation's charity, social science, and reform communities sought to shape the emerging schools. Their multiple visions of social work raised fundamental questions about the mission and direction of the nascent social work profession.

A Woolf of One's Own

Given the ever-increasing numbers of Virginia Woolfs constructed by readers of her work, it becomes essential to devise-and continually to revisemental maps of the critical landscape. Any recent map would reveal the multiplication of theoretical sites and of national and international transportation and communication networks. Woolf's work, reflecting as it does her own increasingly fluid, complex, and multiple visions of self and world, lends itself to a wide variety of readings. Most satisfying are those by people who, aware of their assumptions and, like Woolf herself, wary of their own authority, consciously join the widely reverberating, boundary-transcending conversations about her texts. Less satisfying, although often sources of valuable insights for the larger discussions, are studies that present their readings as keys to everything Woolf thought and accomplished. In this context, it is heartening to read books on Virginia Woolf's life and works that see her as more than a victim-of sexually abusive half brothers, of a domineering husband, of the entire male medical profession, among other people and institutions. In contemporary Western societies where increasingly informed and sensitive audiences encourage oppressed individuals and groups to confess and to protest (often in the law courts) their victimization, such studies are perhaps inevitable. On at least one level, they are also laudable. The cases against the variety of victimizers offered

The Politics of Cultural Representation: Visions of Fields/Fields of Visions 1

In this paper, I address the current debates around ethnography and propose a critical feminist ethnography which depends on the alternative narrative strategies suggested by experimental ethnography and the conceptual achievements offered by feminist standpoint epistemology and minor discourse theory. I argue, as have others, that the traditional scientistic-narrativc techniques associated with ethnography actively constrain theoretical knowledges, mystify power relations embedded in the text, while constructing Authorities with totalizing and omniscient vision. Experimental ethnography offers important textual interventions and revisions which challenge the orderliness and constructed Authorities imposed by realist narratives useful for those feminist projects which attempt to deal with the multiplicity of differences/domination. Postmodern feminist standpoint epistemology and minor discourse theory are concerned with recovering and representing historically repressed local knowledges and visions in ways that do not simply translate them into or through dominant critical/feminist theories. Such projects require ongoing critical dialogue among local voices, theory, and the ethnographer in which what counts as knowledge remains contestable and is contested. I argue that textual constructions of such projects must remain heteroglossic (representing multiple visions to readers) in order to potentially revise critical/feminist theory and practice.

Tapping and defining new power: the first month of visions at Ezquioga, July 1931

Newspaper reports of the first month (July 1931) of multiple visions at Ezquioga in the Spanish Basque region provide an opportunity to study the process of negotiation whereby would‐be visionaries are Accepted or rejected, and visions come to have a content significant and appropriate to the preoccupations of the immediate audience and the wider society.