Submission to The Social Lens: A Social Work Action Blog by Dr. Stéphanie Wahab, PhD, MSW, 90th Anniversary Visiting Scholar and Professor, Portland State University School of Social Work
This blog post is an adaptation of a keynote address I gave at UBC in March 2020. The full keynote can be found here: Teaching social justice in dangerous times: Practices of hope. Social Work and Policy Studies: Social justice, practice and theory, 3(2), p. 1-13.
Dr. Stéphanie Wahab, Practices of Hope Lecture, March 2020
Like many of you, I write these words inside a global pandemic, a climate crises of epic proportions, and a very powerful racial uprising in the United States (where I live). Furthermore, I think and write these words as the world continues to stand still in the face of Israel’s illegal occupation and genocide of my people in Palestine. While we are all inside and affected by these multiple crises, we aren’t all affected in the same ways.
I’ve spent the past 21 years teaching social justice courses to social work students in the US. It is probably more appropriate for me to write that I’ve spent the past 21 years learning with students about oppression, liberation, about pain and joy. I am grateful to all those who have helped me learn along the way, particularly when that learning came at a cost to them.
In this blog, I share four practices of hope I’ve absorbed along the way. I’m focusing on hope because I believe it is infectious, and that it can be evoked, cultivated and chosen. I do not however write about a superficial, Pollyanna-type of hope, but rather, hope as will, hope as action, hope as a way, and hope as a horizon (Yahne & Miller, 1999). I’m confident that social work, particularly social work committed to repurposing settler colonial, white supremacist and hetropatriarchal systems, has an important role to play in this very moment. I’ve been telling MSW students since March 2020, “You were trained for this moment.” I also believe that now is an opportune time for social work systems and institutions to reevaluate and reconsider our relationships with broader systems of control and oppression.
Interrupting Extreme Othering
While we live in dangerous times, the times have always been dangerous for somebody, some people. When I think of danger, I think of structural violence and all its manifestations (white supremacy, settler colonialism, rape culture, capitalism, lack of affordable housing and suitable work). I’m also deeply concerned with the dangers associated with the climate crisis. We are all inside these dangers. I’m not sure there is an outside to these structures.
One marker of the danger(s) in this moment is profound othering. John Powell from the Haas Institute states that “the other is always imaginary, there is no natural other, there is no natural community.”(see, https://bioneers.org/john-powell-celebrating-diversity-create-inclusive-society-ztvz1801/). I’m sure we can all point to countless incidences of othering around us, be it othering of people, othering of the planet, as well as epistemological othering, that is, othering certain ways of knowing (indigenous, body, raced, gendered, artistic, practical, emotional ways of knowing). I believe that interrupting othering, in all its forms, is a practice of hope, as the act of interrupting expresses a desire for something different, a belief that something else is possible.
Moving Towards Complexity and Complicity
So, what does it mean to consider that we are inside the danger as social justice advocates and practitioners of justice and liberation? It means we must be for complexity and complicity. It means, as Amy Rossiter and others have said, “there is no place of innocence” from which to do social work. The interconnectedness of all things and systems renders social work complicit with the very systems we work against.
To move towards complexity and to acknowledge and resist complicity, we can; 1) reject binary thinking, 2) strengthen our distress tolerance muscles, which seems more relevant and necessary than ever, and 3) refrain from simple, atheoretical analyses that relegate decisions, people, ideas, and situations as simply good or bad. I see this need as social workers in Canada and the US consider calls to abolish the police and child welfare. We are inside the danger and must contend with our complicity to pave a different path.
Holding this type of complexity forces us to move slowly, to think before we cancel or call out, and to look for and forge relationships, including difficult ones. Holding this type of complexity also requires creativity, perhaps imagining that which doesn’t exist yet, and it definitely calls for collaboration, for working in collectives and coalitions for recognizing our social and ecological interdependence. Finally, complexity requires that we care about each other, that we care about relationships and don’t view each other as disposable. It calls for doing very difficult and often slow relational work. The problem with purity projects or notions of innocence in our social justice work is that they forgo human interconnectivity in favor of narratives of separation and disconnection. Embedded in the practice of holding complexity and looking for complicity is an expression, perhaps a practice of hope, for it defies settling for the easy or simple answer by assuming there is another rational/explanation/framework/meaning. I suggest that holding space for and seeking another way is an expression of hope.
Collective Grieving
Judith Butler wrote, “We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.” (Butler, 2004).
When the pandemic closed our universities in March and our teaching went remote, I told students that they needed to be prepared as social workers for immense grief, their own, as well as the grief of their communities and clients. As social workers, we must be prepared to deal with the grief that comes from the pandemic, centuries of settler colonialism and racism among other oppressions, as well as ecological grief for years to come.
Grieving, and more specifically grieving together, is a practice of hope since grieving calls us to one another. While we may grieve differently according to our traditions and beliefs, grieving together allows us to stand with and next to each other amidst all kinds of softness and tenderness—an antidote to the protected, harsh, armored moment we are living through. I invite us to consider social movements born of collective grief, Sisters in Action in Canada, Black Lives Matter in the US, the March to return in Palestine, and Mothers of the Playa de Mayo in Argentina, just to mention a few.
Imagining Together
Thus, we can draw from or even create hope through our connections with each other, through building bridges across movements, through recognizing our interdependence, through decentralizing our power and organizing. Dr. Angela Davis repeatedly stated that as “isolated individuals we will always be powerless, we will never have the means of which to even imagine justice. But as communities we can achieve anything.”
Imagining that which doesn’t yet exist is vital for our social movements, our land-based movements. We must learn how to dream together. Walidah Imarisha from Portland State University, and co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science fiction from social justice movements and another world is possible, has said, “all social justice work is science fiction.” Science fiction, Arab futurism, Afro and Indigenous futurism, and Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy can help us flex and strengthen those muscles.
We can think of the need for dreaming and imagination on an individual level and an institutional level. I call on all of us in social work to dream and reimagine how we care for people. This is our moment to dream, to repurpose a social work intent on resisting and repurposing systems of domination through child welfare, criminal in/justice, education, health and mental health care.
My concluding invitation is for us to consider hope as a choice. Hope as will, way, horizon and action (Yahne & Miller,1999). Hope as possibility.
References
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. 19.
Yahne, C. E. & Miller, W. R. (1999). Evoking Hope. In, Bill Miller (Ed.) Integrating spirituality into treatment: Resources for practitioners, p. 217-233.
The Social Lens: A Social Work Action Blog - The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the original author(s) and do not express the views of the UBC School of Social Work and/or the other contributors to the blog. The blog aims to uphold the School's values and mission.
