Reflections on and of Self in South Africa

Abstract

For social workers who are working within a discipline associated with social control an awareness of one’s social location and the impacts thereof is critical. This is particularly true in South Africa, where issues of power, race and class have been overtly contested over centuries. However, the South African literature largely overlooks the necessity of such examination, ignoring issues of power and domination in the social work relationship. I offer my own auto-ethnographic reflections as a South African social worker and researcher, living in Canada, critically examining how power was negotiated. The issues raised here may be relevant for those examining their practice in other contexts. Further, these reflections are useful in the international social work discourse, particularly to researchers engaging in transnational endeavours.

A 40 year (contextualized) social work journey

“…In reviewing not just the child protection role where social work power is largely explicit, I started seeing professional power as associated with social work's middle-class, patriarchal and gender-normative worldviews, decision-making ambit, and access to resources in the social work encounter (Chapman and Withers, 2019;Turton and Van Breda, 2019). I also noticed that expert power is not only exercised through individual practice, education and research but is related to international social work which imposes agendas on the local (Schmid, 2010). For example, I met a non-South African social worker who, despite the identified lack of a technological network was promoting the establishment of a South African child protection registry; and I observed that international aid organizations prioritized funding child trafficking initiatives at a time when the impact of HIV and AIDs was in the foreground locally.…”

African Studies Keyword: Autoethnography

“…In fact, one reason autoethnography may be useful to Africanists is that it is agnostic with regard to discipline, theory, and method. In our review of Africa-related autoethnographic work we found examples in disciplines as diverse as accounting (Retief Venter & de Villiers 2013), anthropology (Schmidt 2010; Begley 2013; Berckmoes 2013; Jourdan 2013; Tomaselli 2013; Koot 2016; Thompson 2017a; 2017b; 2018; 2020; Williams 2021; Kefen Budji 2022), business (DeBerry-Spence 2010), communications (Ferdinand 2015), cultural studies (Tomaselli 2003; Tomaselli & Shepperson 2003), economics (Ansoms 2013), education (Ramrathan 2010; Hernandez, Ngunjiri, & Chang 2015; Tomaselli 2015; Balfour 2016; Timm 2016; Andersen 2018; Mitchell 2016; Brock-Utne 2018), feminism (Dillard & Bell 2011; Mitchell & Pithouse-Morgan 2014), history (Sheldon 2019), international relations and development (Bouka 2013; Clark-Kazak 2013), linguistics (Mwaniki 2016), political science (Vorrath 2013), psychology (Naidu 2014), social work (Schmid 2010), theater (Ajwang’ & Edmondson 2003), as well as in studies of development (Tomaselli 2007; Johnson 2011; Ogora 2013; Koot 2016), diaspora (Williams 2010; Dillard & Bell 2011; Ferdinand 2015; Mawhinney 2019), folklore (Mabasa 2021), leadership (Ngunjiri 2014), memory (Mara 2020b), mobility (Rink 2016), peace and conflict (Ogora 2013; Thomson 2013), religion (Van Deventer 2015; Wepener 2015), and sexuality (Williams 2010; Balfour 2016).…”

Transforming Research Methods in the Social Sciences

“…I would like to illustrate some of these autoethnographic processes by drawing on my own experience. While completing my doctorate, I was prompted to write about the impact of social location in South African social work research because I observed that I was perceived as a foreigner (having lived outside of South Africa for some years) rather than as South African (my preferred identity) (Schmid, 2010). I had not anticipated this additional distance between myself and the persons providing information, and being disturbed by this interaction, wished to interrogate this experience more closely.…”