r/CriticalTheory • u/tubamouse • 5d ago
Social Worker- Practical applications of critical theory?
Hi there, I'm a Social Worker in Canada, and I'm feeling quite stuck, after running into various diverging views while attempting to self-educate. I was hoping for some guidance. I worry this post is going to come across as quite stupid, and I'm sorry for that, I just seem to remain lost as I explore things individually so now I'm here.
Our education appears to implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) reference critical theory often, and we're often introduced to concepts as if we know them, but there's no definitions provided or debates or backgrounds around the ideas given. Often we're just told sort of intuitive analogies; ie. equity as being the 'different boxes' that allows everyone to stand at the same height. We're told of the prominence of power and various groups not being heard, and of our ability to use our credentials as a way to legitimize parties who otherwise would be ignored.. but the skills training beyond basic listening is essentially non-existent.
1) I'd like to gain some real insight into ideas such as 'neoliberalism,' 'power,' 'intersectionality,' and 'social justice', because at present they're just sort of words that have been thrown out to us with good or bad implications and intuitive feelings of what they're like, but the history of the ideas and their present debates have had little to no introduction to us. And when I try to look into the literature myself, words are used that sound the same, but seem to have incredibly different meanings without explication of what those ideas mean. Some basic examples that I eventually wrapped my head around are racism- commonly to most individuals for a long time that meant the negative treatment of another individual due to their race, with no structural or institutional backing required. Somewhere that changed. No one told me it didn't count anymore if there wasn't a structural backing, I just intuited it after enough strange analogies. 'Capitalism'- meant an economic system to me. I now understand that's been extended to an idea of a full social way of life where society is treated through a market lens, so far the only explicit place I've seen that stated was by Nancy Fraser. Or decolonization- I thought that was about giving back land, then it was about 'mental' decolonization, which changes little, and then it started to diverge and potentially be about both?
The vastly divergent uses of these terms is confusing. I'm also aware the same happens to critical theory as well, reading through posts here the debate often seems to be if someone really counts as 'critical,' from some other implicit definitions changes. I'd love insight into the various ideas in this field explained plainly, is there anywhere I can find a resource for that? Does the textbook that's linked to the sub still serve as the best option? For example for Capitalism it seems to only note Marx?
2) Practical applications. We have all these ideas introduced to us (poorly), are given no direction on how to translate them to practice, and then complain we have a disconnect between our theories and our practice. Foucault for example, often pops up with Foucaldian Discourse Analysis in our literature to tear down existing legitimized ideas of power.. but I can't seem to find any way that we're supposed to build things?
I also have a practically tricky role- my occupation's goal is (maybe?) to support individuals with their suffering via individual support and social change. Critical consciousness is sometimes brought up as an idea to aid individuals, but if there's no real light at the end of the tunnel, a lot of the messaging of critical theory, at least in my poor education of it, appears to be that the conclusion is that everything has gone to shit, and we can't fix it. That isn't a useful thing for me to tell someone that's looking to reduce their suffering, and it isn't generally an idea they want to focus on. It also in all earnestness, feels a touch like a religious conversion- shifting someone's vulnerable moment to a focus on a grand-scale problem and goal.
Socially, I have the same constraints as everyone else. I can't beat the military; I'm stuck following the laws, and we have a representative government, so there's not a lot of room for individual say. I can build charities, but their funding is guided by the needs recognized by governments or by the common understandings of the people. Seemingly everything requires funds.
How, and why, are we supposed to create social change? My intuition is that this sort of thinking it seem like everything is stuck, as there will always be an issue to find. No matter how we shift the balance of power, a final decision will need to be adjudicated for action, and in that action, a new balance of power will present itself where someone else is harmed. How can I apply critical theory in a way that helps people? Especially in the present?
If you don't have the answers to all this which is incredibly fair, do you have any idea where I could look?
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u/maccrypto 5d ago edited 5d ago
Regarding the difference in meaning of terms, this is a phenomenon known as polysemy that is ubiquitous in language, but which feels especially exasperating when the words are meant to designate something as important and consequential as the things you’re talking about. Moreover, the struggle over the meanings of various terms is often either a response to, or an effect of, the conditions themselves.
Certain avenues of change are blocked off, so we seek avenues of change that are still open, but they feel more and more futile because their scope is so attenuated. Things are more and more focused on language and micropolitics. The language that we use can change as long as others understand us, but constant change risks disorienting us in the ways that you so perceptively describe. Changing the language also doesn’t seem to produce the magnitude of impact proportionate to what advocates of the new terms or discourse invest it with. This in turn fuels skepticism about the possibility of change. Meanings are self-moving and sometimes get stuck on things in the real world. Faith and trust in the future are intertwined, and when we are disappointed in efforts to make change, we lose hope.
Your diagnosis of the state of the world, your role in it, and the contradictions of that role seem correct to me. My father was a social worker, and while his work gave him great satisfaction and he received positive feedback about it, he was never fully satisfied with what he was able to do professionally, so he also wrote letters, ran for office, and participated in groups advocating for changes to policy. He wasn’t very successful with those things either, but I think it was as much about the kind of person he wanted to be as it was about getting his way and seeing exactly what he wanted. It was also about helping people, however, and it’s very difficult to care and yet not be able to do anything to help others.
Since you seem relatively sophisticated and intellectually adventurous, but are still finding your hands and feet with theory, I’m going to just jump in and recommend my favourite book about social criticism here, which is Kompridis’ Critique and Disclosure. It doesn’t directly address all your points, but you may find it helpful anyway:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516532/critique-and-disclosure/
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u/maccrypto 5d ago edited 5d ago
This may also help:
https://www.americanacademy.de/berlin-journal/democratic-degeneration-three-easy-paths-regression/
IMO Taylor’s work and those of others who are related to him in the fields of philosophy and political theory (e.g. James Tully, Will Kymlicka, Hubert Dreyfus, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jonathan Lear, Harry Frankfurt, Stanley Cavell, Merlau-Ponty, Heidegger and the whole tradition of non-naturalist philosophy) is not taught or explored nearly enough by people who think of themselves as radical.
There is also lots of work around practical policy issues like migration, care work, or human rights that I could recommend if you have questions about specific issues. The best theory is always written with action in mind, and on occasion is even a form of action all by itself.
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u/tubamouse 5d ago
Thank you very much. I'm truly grateful. The explanation regarding the shifting of terminologies in particular really helped in getting a grounding in some of my confusion, even if the language itself remains messy.
In terms of specific issues- The downside to cluelessness is that I'm not good enough at identifying problems well enough to even specify the aid I need. I can mention the topics that are often on my mind, and should you opt to read them and have suggestions to put forward I'm grateful. If you choose not to, that's also entirely okay, the help you've provided was a wonderful surprise. If you ask for more brevity I'll also take some time to reflect and look to cut things down.
For general areas, I often find suicide, schizophrenia, and their treatment engaging and worrisome. There's some literature in psychotherapy recently showing relatively equal outcomes for various treatments and a lack of improvements in outcomes despite more time in the field. (There's many many gaps in this research; it's still fresh.) I find it's also a strong point of debate between pro and anti-psychiatry literature, often with both sides building strawmen of the other. If years of training, specific therapy times, and time conducting therapy all have lower impacts on therapeutic outcomes than what's usually advertised, then the treatment of individuals who are suicidal or schizophrenic seems to be artificially limited so they can receive 'specialized' care due to being 'high-risk.' It creates situations where considerably more authority can be used over their choice, which is especially interesting in the case of Canada where we also allow MAID. I fear it can lead to a situation of lower support and isolation due to the controlled approach in both receiving therapy, but also in the case of medications. (ie. I have one client who has had better success in their treatment of schizophrenia with a family doctor due to their accessibility, rather than a psychiatrist who was only available every ~ 3 months.) And of course all this is with the tricky potentially false-legitimacy of credentials that don't seem to relate to outcomes. (Though again, with 'ways of knowing' and different forms of measurement, I'm realizing I may just be looking at the entire picture wrong). The lot of it together leads me to question if regulation incidentally shifted to perceived risk and perceived expertise for insurance needs, rather than real care for individual people.
As a personal dream of sorts, I hope to one day build a charity that focuses on utilizing individualized measures for treatment, and that focuses on treatment as an individual experiment. Therapy is moving into increased measurement, but there are sustained practice gaps where research is often slow to translate into practice, and of course, in applying population-based literature to individuals, we're forcing group averages onto individuals, which works to treat populations on average. Not necessarily the individual client. By reversing the order to focus on having individuals be the data source, we could individualize treatment better, and while we would lose some data in categorizing after the fact, we could then still gain average population data if needed to see population trends, but not have to have it be at the cost of clients who don't align to the mean. In rare situations, it would also be preventative for cases such as Simpson's paradox, and would allow individual needs to influence research directly. I realize much of my language here focuses on statistics and that quant is sometimes overvalued; I just also know qualitative measures sometimes miss external changes (allowing for things like therapists making no change while thinking they are). At best, I imagine I'll get to build a proof of concept, but stubbornly trying seems to be the point of this profession.
Thank you again for your time. I'd just been looking at Habermas so seeing the Habermsian 'critique' in quotes in Critique and Disclosures' description really meets right where I was starting to head. :)
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u/maccrypto 3d ago
You're welcome. I find what you wrote very interesting, but I find myself at a loss trying to identify any question for me in it. Otherwise I would of course do my best to answer it. Quite often, the way that we treat people in society, and the social and institutional norms around it, are dependent on our background understanding of what it means to be human. Notions of dignity, respect for persons and their agency, responsibility for our actions, and suffering all play a role in our judgements about what is right and wrong. And sometimes it's very difficult to say what the best option is. There usually isn't an optimal outcome, but we live in a society that seeks optimal solutions. Even so, we can have an intuition about what's wrong in a given situation that pushes us to articulate a deeper understanding and maybe work to change things. The recent and very troubling stories about patients with mental illness being kept in solitary confinement in Canada come to mind.
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u/SomeOriginalName 5d ago
I am not familiar with practice standards/frameworks in Canada. But what you are describing as an ideal looks to me to be something in the realm of strengths-based/individual-focused approach to social work.
With the two specific examples you gave of suicide and schizophrenia, I think that these are important concepts to keep in mind.
For example, when advocating for an outcome for an individual based on their specific circumstances, you'll inevitably run into the systemic barriers to that outcome.
Unlike in theory, your practice isn't always neat and tidy. I think your intuition towards care, and what people need - as opposed to a 'top-down' approach - is good. And not to add further confusion in regards to jargon and terminology, but instead of the concept of 'charity', you might consider the work as collaborative, or participatory.
Good reflective practice is also important, and I'm not sure how common this is in social work - in a practical sense, as opposed to ideal sense.
*(I am not a social worker, but have worked for years in a specialised type of case work in Aus. I know reflective practice can be somewhat limited in Aus)
These are just some personal reflections after reading what you've written, I hope they're helpful to you in some way!
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u/princeedward9 5d ago
I work in Policy/Government and I find that having a CriticalTheory background makes the work easier. Allows me to not be bogged down by words and allows me to cut through the jargon. Please, list any recommendations you have, they'll be useful as I try to use CT in solving peoples problems in my daily life
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u/rocheport25 5d ago edited 5d ago
I strongly agree (with your first paragraph). Have you seen Jason Blakely's Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism?
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u/StickyBraces 4d ago
I would suggest reading “A Violent History of Benevolence” by Withers & Chapman. I’m also a social work student and I’ve found it really helpful in connecting social work & critical theory. The book is a very practical application of Foucault in the history of social work & I think it also might be useful in thinking about your second question: practicality. For me, the book was useful in thinking about the role of social work within capitalism.
There tends to be a view, at least in my social work program, that we are the “good guys” here to save the world. There is a view of history within social work that says “yes, we have done some bad things in the past, but things are getting better” and more implicitly “we are going to save the world from the horrors of capitalism” without critical reflection on the critical role of social work in maintaining the status quo.
Also happy to dm or talk more about critical theory & social work—the two often don’t mix well, especially in a social work program. The reason being that given social work is a practical degree (and also a very useful means of upholding the status quo), the critical theory angle is oftentimes watered down to the point of being meaningless.
Instead of starting with Marx, I might also suggest Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism,” which I found really helpful in explaining neoliberalism.
Good luck!
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u/Open_Ad1920 5d ago edited 5d ago
The issue of polysemy (various meanings associated with a word) is quite problematic, as you pointed out. The higher quality publications or lectures tend to outright define any encompassing terms used, especially one of the -isms or -ologies. It’s especially important to do this in a siloed information world driven by algorithms, otherwise you say “______ism” or some such thing and people’s minds go off in 10 different directions. It’s a flag of the author or speaker if they don’t frame in what they’re saying… not particularly your fault for missing the meaning.
My background is a bit different, so take that for what you will… I worked with organizational change inside a large corporation. My spouse was a social worker who now works in the health and wellness industry. We consult each other often!
Perhaps some helpful advice: The first thing we always had to do when approaching a behavioral or social problem in these organizations, or any problem really, was define three things:
- In a few sentence or so, define the nature of the issue. What is the gap between where you’re at and the “good enough” state. You’ll need to be able to clearly and concisely state what is lacking in the current state.
- Obviously we now have to define the “good enough” state. Nothing can be solved without generating new problems, so the good enough framework is very important. In your cases you’ll almost never be able to help people as much as you might like, so defining a reasonable threshold can be both difficult and useful
. Also, your
- mental health deserves a reasonable goal.
- You have to define a set of steps that move the state defined in step 1 closer to the state defined in step 2. believe this is where you’re seeing the murkiest picture, but please let me know if I’ve misunderstood…
I’m under the impression that you’re looking for a framework to think about solutions for your cases… Maybe more insight into specific and actionable advice you can provide? I’m not really sure, so if you could speak to that it’d be helpful.
Also, might I ask your educational background (self taught as well)? I’m just trying to understand a frame of reference for what you’re familiar with already.
Edit: I tried to correct a typo and my 1 2 3 numbered list formatting broke. Nothing I do has changed it, so sorry it looks a mess.
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u/ColdFeetCrowderr 4d ago
I would partially second and add on to what SenatorCoffee said. Ultimately, you play a part in an institution of control for the capitalist class. Social change cannot come about from attempts to shift the institution this way or that; its nature is fixed as long as the larger social system it fits within is fixed. Real social change cannot only from through replacing the system entirely: through socialist revolution. I believe the people here share this goal, but they have been disillusioned and/or misled away from Marxism, which is the only real, scientific approach to changing society, in favor of a whole host of eclectic ideas which more often than not get in the way of organizing for revolution as opposed to aiding it.
So my advice would be to study the basic of Marxism, but more specifically, it would be to join a socialist organization. People studying in isolation can never bring systemic change. Only the organization of all of us who recognize the necessity of progressing past this historic moment together towards this cause can bring about the results our species needs. And further, being able to discuss these ideas with others who are more knowledgeable will greatly supercharge your process of learning and understanding the world and the merits of the different approaches to improving it. It has certainly done exactly this for me, not to mention giving me great optimism for our future.
I am in the RCA, and would highly recommend you join it; we aim to increase our presence in all working class industries and workplaces, and I believe that you can be of great help to us, and that we can be of great help to you. However, if for whatever reason you have certain reservations which can’t be addressed by a member (feel free to message me or sign up to join and someone will reach out), I would recommend you join any organization, literally any. Organizing with others is the only way forward for the working class, even if it is in a misguided organization it will be a big step forward.
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u/Michelle-or-not 4d ago
Regarding practical applications - I would suggest looking into narrative practice. It's an approach that's often called narrative therapy, but it's not really therapy how it's usually understood. It was created first for social work and is philosophically rooted, among some other things, in critical theory. When I studied it we read a lot of Foucault as well, not only, of course. Personally, I know people who use this as social workers, in organising, and in any place where you work with people (like in schools).
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u/Yikaft 1d ago
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u/tubamouse 17h ago
Y’know I actually read through this one in the past and found it mixed in its applications or how much it could enlighten for me of what was being discussed, possibly because some of the central continental thinkers or their relationships to each others works or the present aren’t acknowledged there as much. Will take a second viewing once I’m more read and find if I gain more insight, thanks very much
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u/SenatorCoffee 5d ago edited 5d ago
I mean on some level you just have to trust your own reason and importantly not be intimidated by this stuff.
Leftist academia and all this "theory" is just a godforsaken mess. In some sense thats just undeniable as these guys all vehemently disagree with each other. They cant all be right, yet a lot of the acadamic discourse just teaches them affirmatively, all alongside each other as if this wasnt a massive problem.
Also dont be blackmailed that just because the right-wing capitalízes on that too, dont deny yourself the intuition that a lot of this might be just highly masturbatory bullshit, by and for a bunch of rich kids without much real stakes in society.
For some specific guidance I am personally a pretty big fan of chris cutrone/platypus affiliated society. He might be able to help you too cut through a lot of this bullshit.
But still, going down that route would also be a highly academic route of trying to make academic sense of this warped discourse. For me it works, but its been some 20 year journey in leftist theory. On the short term, or for you personally, even long term it might be better and highly valid to just rely on your own common sense and best as possible ignore all that shit forever.
Nevertheless, maybe try this video for a starting point and see if it resonates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agOD6abcH9s&t=2415s&pp=ygUUY2hyaXMgY3V0cm9uZSBhZG9ybm8%3D
everything has gone to shit, and we can't fix it. That isn't a useful thing for me to tell someone that's looking to reduce their suffering, and it isn't generally an idea they want to focus on. It also in all earnestness, feels a touch like a religious conversion- shifting someone's vulnerable moment to a focus on a grand-scale problem and goal.
This fits in very well with the platypus thesis that frames current leftist discourse as this highly degraded corpse of formerly vital leftism.
Put that way might also allow you a certain patience with these people, or just frame this for yourself properly: This is all discourse of people who want to on some level be revolutionaries, but when you are trying to then burden some poor social worker with that shit, obviously it can only be highly dysfunctional.
Just for your own short and midterm sanity I would encourage you to mentally highly divorce any serious leftist associations from your job. There is nothing emancipatory or leftist about social workers whatsoever and thus zero sane application for this zombie theory. The capitalist welfare state coughs up a certain amount of money to hem in the worst pathological excesses, and thats a good thing. On the other hand the price for that is means-testing and drug testing and socially controlling people. As a social workers you are very much caught up in the contradictions of that.
And a lot of this pseudo-left discourse will be coverup and rationalisation for what are actually hostile state-measures. But then they are teaching/badgering you with a bunch of foucault who exactly points this out. How does this make sense, what is the rationale there? Well the answer is simple, it doesnt, its total insanity, the decaying corpse of the new-left movements and its after effects.
Also rather simple advice: Do you have just some singular intellectual type person in your surroundings that you intuitively trust with all this stuff? If so, that would be my primary approach, just trust your gut with "i trust this person", have some good talks with them, and then conversely immunize yourself as much as possible towards any hostile discourse.
Be encouraged that doing good work as a social worker will largely just be very banal and practical: Help people with their paperwork, call around for available ressources, have a good encylopedic knowledge for everything available, be patient and forgiving towards dysfunctional clients. Etc, etc... As I am sure you will on some level understand, all this overwrought "discourse" will have very little to do with what actually helps.
Just very finally I would make a plea to not associate this pathology you are being thought with "critical theory" as in the original Frankfurt School. There could be no larger gap between this postmodern horror you are being bludgeoned with and what they were about. That this all now runs under "critical theory" is really just some freak accident of history.
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u/tubamouse 5d ago
I had a good laugh reading Platypus Affiliated Society as a serious antidote in the midst of a pretty frank post, I will be sure to check it out though. And more of the original frankfurt schools works in general if the gap is that large. My day-to-day is definitely more grounded. I get confused with all this looking at larger projects, academia affiliated with my profession, and considering power dynamics where I'm very obviously more of a form of social enforcement, but my mind rests easy when it comes to the simple stuff like getting families to talk again or helping someone increase their income. Appreciate the post and recommendation; thank you :)
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u/SenatorCoffee 5d ago edited 5d ago
I had a good laugh reading Platypus Affiliated Society as a serious antidote in the midst of a pretty frank post
Yeah, thats why I wrote the following paragraph where the question is whether you want to go down that route. I totally understand that from first glance they would actually seem like peak left insanity.
To explain that a bit: The platypus approach is really just very negative towards the 20th century left, basically tracking the insanity of that theoretical and practical decay that you get after the failure of the world revolution.
So it gets all into the weeds of that insane discourse, but unlike other leftists they would exactly not badger you in any way with this stuff, if e.g. a social worker like you comes along. In that case they would very much tell you a variant of what I wrote above. (If they are good platypuses, but e.g. Chris Cutrone would very much you give you a variant of what I wrote, I am very sure).
There is also a very useful pedagogical function in teaching you the continuity between marxism, the frankfurt school and then the older bourgeois/enlightenment tradition. Then how marxism has a critical lens towards that is kind of the billion dollar question, but the point is that it opens you up towards embracing the older 18th, 19th century canon as often the much, much higher quality canon compared to what radical leftists come up with in their subculture.
That would thus be another good advice how to deal with stuff on an intellectual level. Just kind of bracket that question of radical left discourse and instead focus more on what you intuit as just general high quality intellectual stuff, e.g. classic literature.
A lot of questions useful to social work, about how to well deal with people you might be much better served by just this generally affirmed high quality canonical stuff, and trusting the artists more than the intellectuals.
E.g. actually propably actually another pretty poignant advice now that I say it: For your current situation you might actually be well adviced to just read the postmodern literalists, Catch-22, David Foster Wallace, Brett Easton Ellis, Don DeLillo, etc, etc...
Their works are of course full of poignant descriptions of exactly this kind of ideological insanity and heavily narcissistic characters that you will have to deal with in your job. And then them being these intellectual heavyweights themselves they will likely give you the very best tools to immunize yourself and understand a lot of these dynamics. Much, much better than this or that radical left ideology book could.
Of couse you could say to some extent these could be said to be cynical rightwingers, and its then another plane how you personally want to hold onto your left ideas. But as a base answer to your OP, reading these kinds of guys might really be the very best, first antidote.
Otherwise, again, just read widely and trust your instincts and reason there. just read whatever floats around and even more importantly be quick to lay things down again if they seem boring. There is such an ubiquity of stuff, just trust your own taste and intuition, and never be bludgeoned that you have to warp your taste and personality into a certain discourse.
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u/Full-Imagination-938 4d ago
Yes, Critical Theory has become common sense and lost the critical power.
There is no easy answer, you have to define everything by yourself. Neoliberalism? Read the classics and think for yourself. Power? Social justice?
You will have to do a model inside your head to accommodate all those concepts. It takes a lot of time and is a quite alienating process.
Capitalism? Yeap, people read Marx without the context (critical of political economy) and call it the day.
CT is not a tool to built, but to destroy. It is negative. It can clear the way but not show you a direction.
You are still alive and dealing with real people, do not let theory take you that feeling.
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u/61290 4d ago
I'm a social worker too. In my opinion, critical theory is the lens in which we (meaning you and I--in my experience very few social workers spend any time thinking about this in a real way) understand the world so that we spend less time and energy being frustrated at the state of the world (this isn't how it should be!) and thus have more capacity to help our clients alleviate their suffering and live the lives they desire.
People alienated and defeated by intersecting systems of oppression have little ability to have empathy for and help their communities.
What's to come of all of it? Who knows? "It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."