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European Journal of Social Work

ISSN: 1369-1457 (Print) 1468-2664 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cesw20

Poverty and the political: wresting the political out of and into social work theory, research and practice

Michal Krumer-Nevo

To cite this article: Michal Krumer-Nevo (2017) Poverty and the political: wresting the political out of and into social work theory, research and practice, European Journal of Social Work, 20:6, 811-822, DOI: 10.1080/13691457.2017.1318264

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13691457.2017.1318264

Published online: 02 May 2017.

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Poverty and the political: wresting the political out of and into social work theory, research and practice Michal Krumer-Nevoa,b

aSpitzer Department of Social Work, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel; bIsraeli Center for Qualitative Research of People and Societies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

ABSTRACT This article explores the relations between social work theory, research and practice in regard to poverty, arguing for the need to bring the political back into these three dimensions of the discipline/profession. Throughout the last decades, social work has been treating practice as a discrete technology, and left outside questions stemming from different theoretical approaches regarding the desired relationship between social workers and service users. This trend has divorced practice from its political dimensions. In this article I suggest to bring the political into social work, and specifically to exemplify the implications of using the context of power imbalance as an analytical framework for theory, research and practice with people in poverty. This move is illustrated through the example of a developing paradigm – ‘Poverty Aware Social Work Paradigm’.

KEYWORDS Critical perspectives; human rights/social justice; practice/ theory/methods; values/ ethics; poverty

Recently there has been a renewed call to connect social work and politics. In a series of publications, Featherstone, Broadhurst, and Holt (2012), Nadan, Weinberg-Kurnik, and Ben-Ari (2015), O’Brien (2011; in Conneely & Garrett, 2015), and Reisch and Jani (2012) claim that in the current Neo- liberal political-economic and ideological context social workers have abandoned their involvement in influencing societal macro-level changes, and have undergone a process of depoliticisation. In this process social work practice has pretended to be value-less, neutral and objective activity, and has been distanced from the professional commitment to social justice, and the political forces that shape the profession have been masked.

Depoliticisation might take two main forms: first, it might be manifested in social workers disre- garding the influence of political-economic context on the profession. This might be the result of a disinterest in macro-level developments, a lack of awareness of the influences of the macro-level on everyday lives or a lack of willingness to take part in changing the macro-level. Second, it might be manifested in treating social work practice as a discrete scientific or technical expertise obscuring its ontological, epistemological and ethical foundations. Thus, the political nature of ques- tions regarding the ‘why,’ ‘how’ and ‘for what goal’ of practice go un-examined.

This article aims to counter this trend. My underlying assumption is that, through its function in academia and in the field, social work serves as a social mechanism that can enhance or challenge the status quo, and contribute to or subvert dominant discourses. Often the role social work plays vis-a-vis the status quo is concealed by words such as ‘objectivity’, ‘truth’, ‘professionalism’ or ‘evi- dence based’. However, my claim is that in order to have better theory, research and practice in general, and with people in poverty in particular, we must acknowledge the fact that over the years these three – theory, research and practice – have served as powerful tools through which

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CONTACT Michal Krumer-Nevo [email protected]

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK, 2017 VOL. 20, NO. 6, 811–822 https://doi.org/10.1080/13691457.2017.1318264

poverty and other social problem have been ‘naturalized’, loaded with negative moral judgments, and service users such as, people in poverty, immigrants, refugees, or youth ‘at risk’, braided as the ultimate Other.

My aim is, first, to expose, via critical reading, the political dimensions of social work, specifically with people in poverty, in three major arenas: theory, research and practice. Second, based on the previous analysis, I would like to offer Poverty-Aware Social Work as a new paradigm to think and to practise social work. This paradigm has theoretical, ontological, epistemological, rhetorical and axiological premises, all of which influence and are influenced by a specific kind of practice (Krumer-Nevo, 2016). During the last six years this practice has been carried out in two Israeli intervention programmes that I lead. As a way of positioning myself, I start the article with a personal disclosure regarding the devel- opment of my understanding and engaging with the political. The article continues with articulating the view that social life is a political arena and with a specific conceptualization of poverty as a political phenomenon. The article then moves on to deal with the interrelated questions of how to politicize social work theory, research and practice with people in poverty.

Self-positioning or what is it ‘to be political’?

I did not grow up in an environment that held political life in high regard. Like most Israelis, my parents used to read the newspaper daily and listen to the news somewhat anxiously, but talk over the dinner table was dominated by personal stories, revealing people’s characteristics and complex relationships within the family circle or within the circles of friends, acquaintances and col- leagues. The public sphere or the political life was there only very vaguely, as a far-away background, disconnected from the daily troubles, nuisances and accomplishments. None of us saw ourselves as influencing it or taking an active part in political activities.

When I met Gideon, my partner for the last 30 years, I realized that there might be another way of dealing with the political. In Gideon’s family, personal behaviours or relationships were very seldom the focus of discussion. Instead, political figures, policy and ideologies were the heroes of the day, dominat- ing excited and involved conversations. Being politically active or at least knowledgeable was seen as a moral obligation, and all family members were in some way or another engaged in the political.

When I started my studies in social work I realized that these two attitudes to the political resemble the deep embedded conflict in the profession between clinical orientation and social activism, my family representing the clinical social workers and Gideon’s family representing the activists. Gradu- ally I came to the understanding that beyond the seeming polarities between these two attitudes, they share a common perception of the political as a well delineated arena, a separate sphere of life one can basically totally ignore or get deeply and emotionally involved in. This is a perception I would like to challenge. There were some professional experiences in my early days in social work that lead me to challenge the perception that the political is a separate sphere of life. The stories I had heard in my family influenced me to write my Ph.D. on the life stories of women in poverty (Krumer-Nevo, 2006). At the time, I had hoped that by giving voice to the pain and struggle of these women, I would be able to bring about a change in the public discourse. In fact I had believed the earth would shake once people had heard and seen and understood the immoral nature of the existence of poverty, and the pain it stored for the people experiencing it.

However, I soon realized how naïve I was. I understood that the absence of certain stories from the public discourse was not the result of the fact that poor people kept their stories to themselves or waited for a researcher to expose them, but rather of the fact that nobody wanted to hear them, to treat them as repositories of valuable knowledge. Rainwater (1970) called the stories told by poor people ‘hostile information’, because the non-poor feel threatened by the information these stories reveal. In this vein, Tardieu (1999), a French activist of ATD Fourth World Movement, an inter- national movement committed to battling poverty, said, ‘The main thing is not to give the poor the chance to make their voice heard, but to open our ears. It is not about empowering the poor, but about humanizing citizens and institutions’ (p. 175).

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The realization that what I knew about poverty was meaningless for policy makers was a turning point in my life as a professional and as an academic, and changed my attitude regarding what is the political. Inspired mainly by feminist writing as well as by a bunch of other critical theories I had stumbled upon during my studies, like the Frankfurt school, Queer theory, the Foucaultian school of thought, and critical race theory, no longer was I led to see the political as a separate sphere of life, but rather came to see it as something inherently interconnected with the personal through a complex network of countless, powerful and subtle threads.

Social life as a political arena

I came to understand social life as a political arena that is a web of power relations between heavily marked status-laden groups. I started to trace the way power infiltrates into and shapes people’s behaviours and relationships, how it radiates from language to policy, and then to people; how exclu- sion, discrimination and oppression are used to create social hierarchies and to justify them not only in a far-away arena but in the personal and interpersonal lives of individuals. I remember how sur- prised I was when I read for the first time that the role spouses take when they make love is shaped by the political, by the social constructions of masculinity and femininity, and that when we make love we are not only pursuing our and our partner’s bodily pleasures, but also confirming (or playing with) our gendered roles.

I started to ask myself questions such as, who dominates the public discourse, and how is this domination constituted and maintained? What is the role of language in processes of domination? What role does social work as a discipline and as a profession play with regard to society’s dominant discourse on marginalized groups? Should social work be an instrument of power and surveillance, or an instrument of emancipation? What makes the suffering of some people ‘legitimate’ while the suf- fering of others remains their own problem?

These questions led me to adopt a politicized reading of what is social work, in general, and social work with people in poverty, in particular, and has changed the way I read theories, conduct research, and teach practice. Politicizing theories, research and practice does not mean that those activities were not political before I ‘politicized’ them. On the contrary, they are awash with power relations, and they cannot but be political activities. Politicizing them is a process consisting two stages. First, it is a process of becoming aware of the political aspects of these disciplinary and professional activities, that is of the ideologies, policies and discourses that shape our theories, research and prac- tice. Second, politicizing professional activities is about, based on this awareness, positioning oneself vis-a-vis those ideologies, policies and discourses – contributing or subverting them.

Poverty and ‘the political’

Using a political perspective to understand poverty is to place poverty in the context of power relations. Building upon the conceptualization of Lister (2004), who based hers on Fraser (1997) and Spicker (1999), I place poverty in the context of power relations in three spheres:

The first, core circle represents poverty as a lack of material capital. The second circle represents the lack of social capital as a result of unequal and unjust distribution, which is expressed in limited social opportunities, such as restricted access to good schools, to good employment, good neigh- bourhoods or good health. The third circle relates to poverty as a lack of symbolic capital, manifested in discrimination, disrespect and the Othering of people in poverty.

Politicizing social work theory on poverty

How does the use of a political lens help us to differentiate between theories on poverty and on people in poverty?

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While theories can be evaluated based on their richness or the applicability of their explanatory power, these criteria do not take into consideration the links between knowledge and power. They ignore the insidious ways in which theories can distort the reality of poverty and justify the inferior status of poor people. Since a political analysis always examines the hegemonic narrative and the ways it excludes marginalized people and points to their own responsibility for their margin- alization, a critical analysis of poverty theories will aim to reveal how they construe poverty and how people in poverty are characterized by them. Are the people represented as Others or as ‘We’? What is the relationship in different theories between poverty and the people who experience it? What is the theory’s emotive impact on us? What do we feel towards the people depicted by the theory?

In the rich body of poverty knowledge, we can distinguish between three theories or groups of theories: the culture of poverty, the structural theories and the critical theories, which I group under the title of Poverty-Aware Paradigm. The first, the amazingly influential Lewis (1968) culture of poverty theory and its affiliates, regards poverty as the sum product of the psychological, moral, behavioural and cultural pathologies or deficits of poor people. This is a classic example of a stigmatizing discourse, which portrays poor people and ‘welfare clients’ primarily as Others, depen- dent, lazy, irresponsible and bad parents (O’Connor, 2009) (for critical reviews of Lewis’ approach, see Abramovitz, 1996; Katz, 1995; Wilson, 1987). Examining the representation of people in poverty in this theory we can say that it offers a decontextualized, monolithic, uniform and cyclic picture of poor people that blames them for the further reproduction of poverty. Although it perceives poverty as the main factor in the development of the culture of poverty, people’s characteristics achieve an autonomous status once this sub-culture appears, and indeed those behavioural characteristics dom- inate the whole picture, creating in the readers an emotional combination of pity for the people and anger towards them.

The culture of poverty theory goes hand in hand with the hegemonic narrative that assumes that the poor are essentially different from the non-poor, that there is an unbridgeable gap between them. In turn, the behaviours become the target for intervention, and since the people are created in the public imagination as Other, this kind of intervention aims at changing them through control and surveillance (Moffatt, 1999).

This theory fails to address all three foci constituting the political understanding of poverty – the lack of material, social and symbolic capital. It treats the lack of money as only a background variable, that might had influenced the development of the deviant characteristics, but once those appeared, they become the focal point of interest, and poverty is left to be irrelevant. The lack of social and sym- bolic capital is totally ignored in the theoretical framework.

The second kind of theories employs a structural perspective that put poverty in the context of inequality. This approach perceives poverty as the result of economic and social structures and insti- tutions that promote inequality through insecure job markets (Quigley, 2003; Zeytinoglu & Muteshi, 2000); unhealthy housing and violent neighbourhoods (Wilson, 1987, 1996); failing school system (Chubb & Moe, 1996; Peters & Mullis, 1997); lack of access to health services (Bond, 1999); and weak, stigmatizing, and privatized welfare systems (Dominelli, 1999). These create limited and con- fined life trajectories that in turn influence poor people’s behaviour (Wilson, 1987, 1996). Thus, while a cultural explanation will consider women’s decision to become single mothers a consequence of an immoral personality or the internalization of their families’ norms, structural theories will inter- pret it as a rational response to the limited availability of breadwinners in the context of unemploy- ment and incarceration (Edin & Kefalas, 2005).

Where the culture of poverty sees the solution for poverty in transforming the personal character- istics of the poor through more or less decontextualized individualized means, the structural approach sees it as a matter of changes in policy, in the political arena and specifically through poli- tics of redistribution. Indeed the claim for changes in the politics of redistribution has been the rally- ing point of radical social workers and activist social work. Its current form is the developing body of knowledge on the involvement of social workers in policy practice, in which social workers are

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encouraged and given tools to contribute to policy changes in the organizational, local and national levels (Gal & Weiss-Gal, 2013).

People in poverty are seen in this theory mainly clustered in groups, since politics of redistribution is best suited to answer the needs of groups – such as women, single parents, old people, immigrants, etc.

But the structural theory failed to inspire a full-fledged direct practice. I see this failure as resulting from the tendency of this theoretical framework to see the political as separate from the personal, and from the inability of this school of thought to relate to the endless threads that connect the pol- itical and the personal, specifically in the lives of people in poverty. If we go back to the three circles comprising the political conceptualization of poverty shown in Figure 1, we can say that while this kind of theory stresses the socio-economic dimensions of poverty, that is the lack of material and social capital, it ignores the many ways in which power relations play out in the most subtle, minor gestures, in the smallest interactions and day-to-day encounters. Not dealing directly with the symbolic dimension of poverty leaves a void that is quickly filled up by hegemonic narratives and stereotyping, the upshot of which is blaming the poor for their condition.

Indeed, after teaching poverty for more than 20 years, I know that while social workers are quite willing to adopt a structural analysis of poverty they do not see the connections between the inter- personal relationships of direct practice and the politics of redistribution that is negotiated and deter- mined at the arena of policy makers. Hence, they find it hard to harness the notion that poverty is unequal power relations to the understanding of the micro-level, of specific service users’ behaviours and choices. Again and again I’ve heard,

I know that poverty is the result of unequal and unjust societal arrangements, but with Dina, my client, it’s differ- ent. She really is responsible for her poverty, because she got married too early, has too many children, will not take the job offered her, and she spends money on hair color instead of buying food.

Countering such a claim is a challenge taken by the third kind of theories, the critical ones, which are the platform for the developing ‘Poverty-Aware Social Work Paradigm’ (Krumer-Nevo, 2016). This paradigm builds upon a structural analysis of poverty, and shares with it its macro-level analysis. But, and this is a crucial but, it couples it with a strong focus on the realm of symbolic capital, or lack thereof. This in turn translates into politics of recognition, which boils down to a detailed portrayal of the agency and knowledge of people in poverty, a heightened sensitivity to language and other symbolic aspects of domination, and an acute awareness of Othering and the constant struggle against Othering (Lister, 2004). The focus on the realm of symbolic capital calls our attention to the

Figure 1. The wheel of poverty (based on Lister, 2004).

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micro-level of everyday experiences and relationships, in which people in poverty feel intensely the effects of power and powerlessness. The psychiatrist Pierce (1970) calls experiences such as stigma- tization, discrimination and Othering ‘micro-aggressions’. These may include inconspicuous, appar- ently innocuous behaviours, such as a facial expression of disgust, or a bodily expression of distancing or withdrawal.

Micro-aggression of this sort is exemplified in an experience that Tal, one of my students, was involved in when she accompanied Gila, a poor woman, to the electricity company to settle Gila’s debt. The clerk, seated in an open space that offered no privacy, was sympathetic and tried to help, but required her supervisor’s approval to do so. She stood up and called loudly to the other side of the large and crowded office, ‘Svetlana … I need your advice, I’ve got a welfare case here.’ Gila said nothing, but Tal saw her cringing silently in her seat, absorbing the pain.

Why is the emphasis on symbolic capital important? Because the struggle over symbolic capital and the politics of recognition take place not only in a far-away political arena but in the interactions between social workers and service users. When we, social workers, accept or reject service users’ narratives and interpretations, we are engaged in politics of recognition; when we decide the aims of intervention we are involved in politics of recognition. In fact, every segment of practice involves issues of symbolic capital and politics of recognition. Moreover, the notion of symbolic capital inspires the development of a new theorization of welfare, which designates poor people as active social agents that respond to, and cope with, poverty in endless ways and seek to overcome it (for a detailed account of the agency of people in poverty see Lister, 2004, chapter 6). It enriches the discourse with the simple, yet essential notion, that people in poverty struggle against poverty routinely, using various tactics on a day-to-day basis. They hate it, are afraid of bequeathing it to their children, do not accept or justify it.

In contrast to the culture of poverty theory that puts no distance between poverty and the people – as if the people with their individual characteristics are personifications of poverty – and to struc- tural theories that recognize poor people’s resistance only when it occurs in the public arena in a more or less organized manner, the analysis of the symbolic dimensions of poverty acknowledges the resistance of people to their poverty in everyday life. Some behaviours are easily recognized as resistance to poverty, for example when people work and are being good parents. But we really do not need a theory to recognize these behaviours as a struggle against poverty. What the paradigm of poverty-aware social work provides us with is a new understanding of what the hege- monic discourse calls ‘problem behaviours’. The recognition of these behaviours not as expressions of pathology opens up a new horizon for conceptualization. For example, they might be communicat- ing suffering, which is different than pathology, or they might be communicating resistance to poverty in ways that are unimaginable for people who do not know poverty from personal experi- ence. Even behaviours of self-destruction might contain aspects of resistance to poverty.

In terms of policy, incorporating a symbolic dimension in the anti-poverty efforts implies comple- menting the politics of material redistribution with a politics of recognition (Lister, 2004). In that latter field, we, social work researchers and practitioners, play a major role and have special responsi- bility, as through our daily practice we are engaged in creating representations of people in poverty. As academics we create representations of service users when we plan or write a research, and as prac- titioners we are involved in the politics of recognition whenever we talk about service users with col- leagues, consult about our work in supervision, or even when we write a psychosocial report (for an example of a psychosocial report written through a critical social work perspective see, Weiss-Gal, Levin, & Krumer-Nevo, 2012). Thus, we are under the obligation of being constantly aware of these rep- resentations and their repercussions.

Politicizing social work research on poverty

How can recognizing the political guide us in thinking about social work research? If we accept that we are actors in the realm of representations and symbolic capital, what are the implications of this role for research?

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The first step in developing an answer to these questions is adopting critical reflexivity to guide us through the research process (Fook, 1999; Hesse-Biber & Piatelli, 2007). The interpretive, critical and participatory turns in the social sciences have provided us with the notion of research as a political act, a loaded and contested activity. These legitimize questioning our positioning regarding the status quo and choosing whether to strengthen or challenge hegemonic attitudes through our research. Critical reflexivity begins with examining our research questions, continues with examining the methods we employ and concludes with examining the way we present our research.

Politicizing research questions

Politicizing research questions entails reflexivity regarding both the perspective guiding the ques- tions and their content. As feminist theorists, such as Crenshaw (1989), Harding (2007), Hill-Collins (1991) and Hooks (1984, 1994), have taught us, the choice of perspective is crucial when studying topics related to the lives of marginalized people: when we represent the hegemonic perspective, we tend to examine the faults of the marginalized; when we represent the perspective of the margin- alized, we will often end up with surprising, even radical findings.

A simple and striking example is poor people’s perspective regarding their social workers. There is an abundance of research ostensibly supporting the claim that people in poverty are hard to reach, or that they lack the motivation or capacity for therapy. However, when poor people were asked in a qualitative study about their social workers, we learnt that they perceive their social workers as hard to reach or uncooperative (Krumer-Nevo, 2006; Krumer-Nevo, Slonim-Nevo, & Hirshenzon- Segev, 2006). Clearly both perspectives might have a kernel of truth. The point is whose truth do we need more in order to make our professional body of knowledge more comprehensive?

When exploring social life from the perspective of people in poverty, we should be cautious not to treat them as knowledgeable only with regard to their personal lives. Instead we should see them as full-fledged citizens having valuable knowledge in respect to inequality, in respect to policy, social institutions and structures (Krumer-Nevo, 2005). We can take Sara, whom I interviewed in a life story study, as an example. Speaking with her, I was under the impression that she was not used to be asked about her thoughts or opinions. She answered me in brief and said that she was upset because life was so difficult, having six little kids and a husband who worked in a sheltered job, earning almost nothing. I asked her a question that I hardly ever ask – ‘have you thought about going to work?’ She said ‘yes, but the baby is too young, maybe when he gets older.’ At that moment all I knew about the knowledge of people in poverty did not help me in not hearing what she said as an excuse. However, I continued questioning her for her theory, for her explanation regarding the situation, and said something to the effect of how hard it is to go out to work when you have a baby, but had she ever thought of sending the baby to childcare with a subsidy from the social welfare department? Her answer shocked me, because she said something that is crucial to anti- poverty policy yet seldom discussed.

She said that if she went to work, she would be employed as a cleaning lady, and get paid on an hourly basis. Meanwhile her payment to childcare would be made in checks that she would have to give in advance for the whole year. If the baby got sick, as often babies do in childcare, she would lose a couple of days’ salary and would not be able to cover the check she had already given. In a few simple words she depicted a complex picture of the intersection between the limited structure of the job market, especially for women at the bottom of the employment ladder, and the advance pay- ments required by the public childcare system in Israel, the very system that was designed to enable poor women to leave home for work.

If we remember Sara when thinking about the woman whom my student was complaining about, the one who got married too early, had too many children, spent money on hair colour instead of buying food, and refused the job offered to her, we can understand her refusal to the job not as an irresponsible decision, a proof of her passivity and dependence. Rather, we can see it as a rational and responsible decision that takes into account the context of her limited resources. Thus, these two

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little stories exemplify the kind of twist that research questions can take when the perspective of people in poverty is taken into account, and their consequent potential to provide us with a clear picture of structural deficiencies.

In addition to the research perspective taken, researchers should also pay attention to the content of their research questions. I suggest that research questions should be focused on the documen- tation and analysis of the manifestations of policy-induced inequality in everyday lives, and the dynamic ways by which they limit people’s real opportunities. I also suggest that studying inequality should be complemented by an agenda of hope, by opening possibilities through studying the agency and resistance of people in poverty and their successes, instead of painstakingly collecting and dissecting their deficiencies.

In addition, studying inequality should take into consideration the intersection of poverty with other marginal positions – gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality and disability – in order to give us a fuller, and more accurate, picture of what poverty is for the various people who experience it and to avoid an essentialized and unified conception of them.

Politicizing research methodology and writing

Participatory methods focus on the life knowledge of people with direct experience with the exam- ined phenomenon and use methods such as focus groups and arts that are very fruitful in eliciting people’s experiences, interpretations and theories (Lykes & Coquillon, 2007). Qualitative method- ologies in general are regarded as better suited for exploring participants’ perspectives. But quanti- tative methodologies also have an important role, as long as they are used in the same critical reflexive vein. Quantitative studies are important, even crucial, in uncovering inequality. A commu- nity-based study I conducted collaboratively with immigrants who came to Israel from the Caucasus might serve as an example. This group, who originates from the southern, hilly region of the former Soviet Union, suffers from unique socio-economic difficulties and stigma. Some of the community’s activists wanted to collect data about the community’s young people’s experience in the army in order to examine their intuition that the community’s youngsters are discriminated against. The acti- vists helped us pen a questionnaire that included questions that we would never have thought of asking, and they were also involved in analysing the data. The findings were later published in an academic paper (Krumer-Nevo, Malka, & Mordechaiv, 2013), but more importantly, a special version of them was created for the activists’ use, and it helped them later in their negotiation with the army authorities and with changing policy.

The writing of more than one version of the findings is part of the larger issue of writing. Fine and Harris (2001) argue that researchers have a responsibility to ‘find audiences of worth’, to think through those who will respect, engage and will be committed to the research agenda. The writing of various versions of the research report also entails decisions regarding rhetoric and language. The judicious use of those is paramount if want to prevent othering of people in poverty (Krumer-Nevo & Sidi, 2012). This aim can be achieved for example, through the researcher’s use of herself as subject in the research report. Using this strategy helps to construct the report as partial and the claims discussed as subjective. In addition, a special attention to the vocabulary and avoidance of jargon, help to keep distance from hegemonic attitudes regarding people in poverty. The specific audience of the research report should naturally bear on its rhetoric, whether it is targeted at academic audience, professional audience, policy makers, activists or people in poverty.

Politicizing social work practice with people in poverty

How can anchoring social work practice in the matrix of power relations inspire new modes of prac- tice with people in poverty?

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Critical, feminist, anti-oppressive and post-modern social works have already developed forms of emancipatory direct practice that is shaped by political analysis and sets political aims (e.g. see Bailey & Brake, 1975; Baines, 2007; Brake & Bailey, 1980; Bricker-Jenkins, Hooyman, & Gottlieb, 1991; Dom- inelli, 2002a, 2002b; Ferguson & Woodward, 2009; Ife, 1997, 2001; Mullaly, 1997, 2001; Parton, 2009; Pease & Fook, 1999; Sakamoto & Pitner, 2005; Thompson, 2006). The Poverty-Aware Paradigm uses some of their guidelines but adapts them to be particularly sensitive and suitable for working with people in poverty. The rationale behind this paradigm and the strategies it uses is the notion that people always resist their poverty. The role of social workers is thus, to join people in poverty in their struggle in order to make it more successful. Due to lack of space it is impossible to give a full account of these strategies, only to name three of them and give a short example of a fourth one.

The first strategy is working in the real life context (Saar-Heiman, Krumer-Nevo & Lavie-Ajayi, in press). Intervention in the real-life context has two characteristics: first, it does not occur in an artificial space, such as the office, but rather in the natural life space, its specific arenas might vary depending on the specific population. The second characteristic of intervention in the real-life context is that it is not limited to one fixed space, but is dynamic and moves between different spaces relevant in service users’ lives.

The arena that is most relevant in poor people’s lives is their homes. Meeting service users at their homes, rather than at the agency, involves a dramatic shift in power relations, enables social workers to become witnesses to the hardship caused by poverty and enables the development of strong alli- ance between social workers and service users. Meeting service users on a regular basis at their neighbourhoods and homes is different from the narrowly defined ‘home visit’ which serves usually very limited purposes (Winter & Cree, 2016). This format is offered to service users, never imposed on them. From my experience, most of the people who were labelled as ‘uncooperative’ in social service departments are happy with this offer.

The second strategy is called active mediation and advocacy. Based on the recognition that people in poverty do not succeed in actualizing their rights even when they know them because service users’ lack of symbolic capital makes it easier on administrators and officials in diverse institutions, such as the housing company or the electricity company to mistreat them, to ignore their rights, to exhaust them with endless bureaucratic requests or to humiliate them on a personal level, we understand mediation and advocacy to be pro-active, continuous and personal (for an example of this kind of practice see the intervention story at Shimei et al., 2016). It involves also working through experiences of micro-aggressions that service users might have undergone in their past encounters with officials at administrative authorities.

The third strategy is the combination of the micro – direct practice – with the macro – policy practice (see Gal & Weiss-Gal, 2013 for a description of social workers’ involvement with policy practice). Based on the understanding that personal problems originate in injustice at the macro level, social workers who work in direct practice offer service users to join them in the activity for policy change. In this process both social workers and service users acquire critical consciousness and develop skills of social activism.

The fourth strategy is joining people’s resistance. Standing by service users requests that social workers become experts in recognizing displays of resistance in the micro-level in order to join them. These displays could sometimes be transitory or momentary, at times not even consolidated as behaviours at all, existing only at the level of dreams, attitudes and aspirations. In order to recog- nize resistance we must understand that we work in an arena dominated by power relations and by a hegemonic discourse that induce us to see poor people as Others. This awareness will enable us to navigate and resist hegemonic interpretations and to offer critical ones that change the way interven- tion is taken. As an example I did not choose a heroic resistance story, but a simple, micro-level one. I wish by this choice to shed light on the struggle and agency lying beneath the surface of an everyday, mundane behaviour that seems ‘problematic’ at first sight.

It is a story I heard from a social worker about an older man, ‘a chronic case’, who was known to the social service department for many years, and had come to see his social worker asking for money to

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pay for a bus ticket to a nearby city in order to visit his hospitalized wife. The social worker who told me this story was furious at the man, telling me that he was an example of the ‘bad client’ (Urek, 2005) – dependent, unable to take care of his basic needs on his own, a client who clearly did not understand the social worker’s role nor that the social welfare department lacked funds for this purpose. With years of experience that the older man had with the Social Welfare Department he should have known not to come with such a request to his social worker.

Working on the assumption that service users usually do their best to resist poverty, I questioned the social worker for some more information. An interesting picture emerged. It appeared that the man had come to the social worker carrying plastic bags filled with little presents he wanted to bring to his wife – some soap, shampoo, candies. These were donations from private people in the town. A couple of days before he came to the social worker, he had gone from one small shop to the other in order not to visit his wife empty handed. He came to his social worker because he could not ask the bus driver to let him travel for free, and he needed help with this final task.

This information changed the man’s portrayal from dependent to independent, from a person who did not take care of himself to a person caring for his wife, from someone unable to understand the social worker’s role to one who gives the social worker the opportunity to acknowledge his efforts and small achievements, and to become a partner in his journey to his wife.

Unearthing this perspective revealed the older man’s agency. Adhering to the hegemonic dis- course, we would ignore the man’s request or see changing his attitudes as a goal for our interven- tion. However, recognizing his agency and resistance shifts entirely our position, makes his request totally rational, and leads us to stand by him. This new stance of poverty awareness will result in a total different dialogue than the one the social worker had with the man. In this new dialogue social workers confront the naked reality of poverty. They do not mask the lack of money with a ‘lack of motivation’ or a ‘lack of understanding of the social worker’s role’. They recognize the diffi- culties and challenges that face people who are trying to live a decent life in the context of poverty. Only after we acknowledge the way poverty is manifested in real life, we will be able to see people’s agency, and then use words in the dialogue with them to name their efforts, to stand by them in order to magnify those efforts, and, hopefully, to turn them into successes. In our story, a poverty-aware social worker would appreciate the old man’s request, and would tell him

I’m happy you came to me for help with this one. You know that we don’t have any money in our budget for a request like yours, but we won’t let you go out of this office without the money you need. Let’s think of creative ways to raise this money now.

After we help the man get to his wife, we might exercise policy practice, with or without him, in order to set up a small flexible budget at the social service departments for precisely this kind of on-the- spot humanitarian needs.

Summary

Social work has the potential to be provocative, to challenge the status quo, to reveal poverty as a site of injustice, to identify the numerous and incessant occurrences in which injustice happens and the structures and institutions that make it happen. By adopting a political lens in thinking about the the- ories we create and use, the research we conduct, and the practice we teach and carry out, we will be better positioned to fulfil our commitment to promote social justice, and not less importantly, and maybe even more importantly, we will enhance our relevance in the lives of people in poverty. What more can we ask for?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

820 M. KRUMER-NEVO

Notes on contributor

Michal Krumer-Nevo is associate professor at the Spitzer Department of Social Work, and the director of the Israeli Center for Qualitative Research of People and Societies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

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