Throughout many of my courses, one theme that continued to emerge for me was understanding how to effectively work with and across difference in social work practice. As a white, culturally western person working with predominantly Indigenous families, I am aware of how easily cultural exchanges become less about fostering genuine diversity and more about cultural domination. Although practicing at a micro level, in working as a Family Preservation worker with CFS, I work almost entirely with Indigenous families who are themselves caught in a system that is a legal imposition, and yet one that also seeks to address very real challenges arising out of a legacy of colonialism, racism, an exploitation that has wreaked havoc on their communities and family life (Carniol, 2000). In my encounters with supporting clients, I am aware of how the intimate life of family is so deeply political, and that in discussions around such things as parenting, child rearing, and relationship, we are more profoundly discussing culture, values, and world-views. In these cross-cultural exchanges, I am also increasingly aware of how our assessments of potential risk for children, and information we diffuse in the name of safety and ‘common sense,’ is often more accurately the invisibility of the “Western gaze” disseminating whiteness and its related norms and values (Lee & Bhuyan, 2013).
Often, culturally competent approaches are encouraged to remedy these cultural blunders, whereby a practitioner can acknowledge and use symbols of culture to integrate in the shared exchange, as in the case of parenting education that incorporates cultural language or activities. However, with this approach, cultural interventions may be incorporated only superficially, and although making the intervention more acceptable it may still ultimately leave the central colonizing function in tact (Johnson, Garner, Walters, & Armstrong, 2015). These subtle processes of cultural and social exclusion may reveal the extent and magnitude of the moral impulse for creating and transforming the "Other," thereby revealing the structural contradictions within social work practice and liberal societies more broadly, to the stated vision of inclusivity and diversity (Chambon, 2013).
As a potential micro-level practice solution to this, I was drawn to the work of Rossiter (2011) who presents another way forward for honoring genuine difference and diversity through "unsettled practice," and adopting a stance of not knowing. Instead, by not knowing, we can escape the totalizing impulse of our categories of difference and sameness that continuously construct the "Other," and towards an orientation which defies our comprehension, thereby honoring the true uniqueness of another. Thus, when we can adopt this practice stance of not knowing, which can be expressed from a position of cultural curiosity, we can begin to work in a truly multicultural way and begin to see culture as a process - where being "culturally competent practitioners will result not from rigid adherence to specific paradigms of practice but instead a capacity to make use of many of them" (Williams 2006, p. 218).
What Does This Mean for My Leadership Practice?
Understanding these issues and possible solutions at the micro level also requires organizational and mezzo level understanding and change to reinforce and support practice approaches. In my own leadership practice, this has included:
Within my practicum project, as one component of my final report I identified the lack of existing cultural work, the limitations of existing culturally competent approaches, and the need for process oriented approaches in working with culture. I explained what that shift could look like from a cultural curiosity framework. This was then presented to key stakeholders who are also exploring how to ensure we are working in a culturally sensitive way.
I am currently developing a further understanding of how to incorporate these more diverse, open, and multicultural ways of practicing at a micro level, and developing processes for how to operationalize and support this type of practice approach at a mezzo level through supervision, organizational direction and decision making, and policy.
These approaches will then be incorporated into a program framework and practice model, as we develop a framework for a family preservation program for the NWT.
Stark, F. (n.d.). quotefancy [website]. Retrieved April 14, 2018 from: https://quotefancy.com/freya-stark-quotes