Assignment: Anti-Oppressive Social Work Practice

Anti-oppressive social work means critically reflecting on your own cultural identities and how the social environment impacts these identities. Acknowledging power and privilege can be uncomfortable; however, with values of multiculturalism and social justice, social workers are committed to engaging in their own personal work and addressing social barriers clients may experience. Social workers view clients from a strengths-based perspective utilizing client strengths to support their goals, rather than pathologizing clients from the lens of the dominant culture.

For the past six weeks, you have learned about the social construction of social identities, structural inequality based on dominant and non-dominant groups, and oppressions based on sex, class, and race. While readings have continuously pointed out white privilege as the dominant group privilege, you also know that privilege is not equally distributed in groups. Intersecting identities creates unique experiences for clients. For this assignment, you draw from what you have been learning during the first part of this course and discuss strategies for anti-oppressive social work practice.

THE ASSIGNMENT

 a 2- to 3-page APA formatted paper in which you:

Explain the potential impact of white privilege on clients from both dominant and minority groups (consider impact of both positive and negative stereotypes).

Explain how intersecting identities might impact an individual's experience (for example, race/ethnicity and gender, race/ethnicity and class, race/ethnicity and ability, race/ethnicity and sexual orientation, race/ethnicity and class).

Providing specific examples, explain how a social worker might utilize cultural strengths when working with clients.

Describe 2-3 social work skills and how a social worker might use them to engage in anti-oppressive work.

Support ideas in paper with at least 2-3 course resources (please reference specific chapters, not the entire textbook) and at least one additional peer-reviewed article from the Walden library (not assigned in this course) to support your ideas.

In addition to required sections, please note the following essential information about your papers:

In APA style, there should be a TITLE PAGE, an ABSTRACT which is a very brief overview of the paper, example: The purpose of this paper is to discussion the topic of X (etc), PAGE NUMBERS, an INTRODUCTION, which introduces the topic and explains to the reader what the paper will contain (in this paper it needs to be brief, just a few sentences), IN TEXT HEADINGS that correspond with the sections that are required in your assignment guidelines, and a CONCLUSION, which wraps up the concepts in the paper for your reader, and a REFERENCE page.

References

Adams, M., Blumenfeld, W. J., Castaneda, C., Hackman, H. W., Peters, M. L., & Zuniga, X. (Eds.). (2013). Readings for diversity and social justice. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge Press.

Mattsson, T. (2014). Intersectionality as a useful tool: Anti-oppressive social work and critical reflection. Affilia, 29(1), 8-17.