The power to promote wellness, resist oppression, and foster liberation is grounded in psychological and political dynamics. Hitherto, these two sources of power have been treated in isolation, both for descriptive and prescriptive purposes. As a result, we lack an integrative theory that explains the role of power in promoting human welfare and preventing suffering, and we lack a framework for combining psychological and political power for the purpose of social change. In this article, the author puts forth a psychopolitical conceptualization of power, wellness, oppression, and liberation. Furthermore, he introduces the concept of psychopolitical validity, which is designed to help community psychologists to put power issues at the forefront of research and action. Two types of psychopolitical validity are introduced: type I—epistemic, and type II—transformative. Whereas the former demands that psychological and political power be incorporated into community psychology studies; the latter requires that interventions move beyond ameliorative efforts and towards structural change. & 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The role of power in wellness, oppression, and liberation: the promise of psychopolitical validity

Reflective practice has become an influential concept in various forms of professional education, for example, in nursing and social work. However, there has been a common tendency for it to be oversimplified in practice, and, furthermore, dominant understandings of reflective practice can themselves be criticised for lacking theoretical sophistication in some respects – particularly in relation to the social and political dimensions of learning and professional practice. This paper therefore seeks to clarify the theoretical underpinnings of reflective practice and to propose developments in relation to the missing sociological elements. It briefly reviews current dominant understandings of reflective practice before proposing developments in the theory base to make it more theoretically sophisticated in general and more sociologically informed in particular. In this way, the foundations for a critically reflective practice are sketched out.

Developing critically reflective practice

This article argues that cultural competency promotes an obsolete view of culture and is a form of new racism. Cultural competency resembles new racism both by otherizing non-whites and by deploying modernist and absolutist views of culture while not using racialist language. Drawing on child welfare, cultural competence is shown to repeat what Lowe (1993) calls an ontology of forgetting Canada's history of colonialism and racism. A recommendation is made for jettisoning cultural competency and emphasizing instead a self-reflexive grappling with racism and colonialism.

Cultural Competency as New Racism: An Ontology of Forgetting

In interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, intersectionality has been a primary framework for thinking about multiple identities and the interconnectedness of various systems of oppression in women...

Toward a Continuum of Intersectionality Theorizing for Feminist Social Work Scholarship

This article explores the connection between reflection and a critical approach to social work practice. By critical social work practice is meant a refusal of/opposition to the interlocking relations of power that pervade social worker encounters with clients. Frequent mention is made in current social work literature of the importance of workers recognizing their social location in challenging racial, class, gender, heterosexual, and ableist structures of domination. Reflection on the privileges associated with social location is considered the cornerstone of such an anti‐oppressive practice, and Mary Ellen Kondrat’s article on critical self‐reflectivity provides an important theoretical contribution to, and articulation of, what this would actually look like. However, drawing on Foucault’s recognition of the power‐knowledge axis, and his conceptualization of power’s capillary form, the author argues that the possibility of resisting the reproduction of dominant power relations rests on an analysis of o...

Self‐reflection in critical social work practice: subjectivity and the possibilities of resistance

Challenging Oppression: A Critical Social Work Approach

Becoming an Ally: Breaking the Cycle of Oppression (2nd edn)

The current vogue of thinking in relation to social work with migrants suggests that ethnic rather than Australian social workers can work more effectively with migrant groups. This thinking tends to underestimate the problems experienced by “ethnic professionals”. My experiences as a Greek social worker working with Greek migrants led me to the following conclusions: that significant adaptation must be made to casework theory when applied to migrant groups; and that the ethnic social worker experiences problems which, even though of a different nature to the Australian social workers' difficulties, can also preclude effective work being undertaken.

Loula S. Rodopoulos

Papers

Challenging Oppression: A Critical Social Work Approach

Becoming an Ally: Breaking the Cycle of Oppression (2nd edn)

Social Work with Greek Migrants: A personal experience of the issues and dilemmas

Praise Is Not Enough