This assignment is designed to help you explore an important intersection of your identity in social and historical context and better understand how that social location is likely to affect your social work practice.
1. Describe an intersection of your identity that has meaningful social consequences for you. For example, you may choose to describe an intersection of race, gender identity, and socioeconomic status that shapes what it is possible for you to do and be and how others perceive you. Remember that this intersection may include axes of identity beyond race, gender, and class, such as sexual orientation, citizenship status, ethnicity, age, or ability that have personal and political effects. Excellent papers will demonstrate a deep engagement with course materials on intersectionality rather than presenting a single gory or additive depiction of identity. (It’s a good idea to define what an intersectional perspective is early in this paper.) Papers should integrate contemporary and historical knowledge about privilege and oppression pertaining to your intersectional identity and describe how this important intersection has shaped your past and present experiences. You may find it useful to include specific personal experiences, but your paper should analyze these experiences through an intersectional lens and link them to systemic forms of oppression and privilege.
2. What are the implications of the above for your professional practice with clients who share aspects of your intersectional identity and for those who do not? For example, what might it mean to be a young, Black, cisgender man from a large city working with a White, low-income woman from a remote rural area of the state? What challenges and opportunities might be likely to arise in this therapeutic relationship? What assumptions might you and the client make about one another? What are the likely consequences of these assumptions? How might your respective social locations “set you up” to reproduce systemic forms of oppression in your practice? How could you plan your work together to maximize the quality of the therapeutic relationship, increase your understanding of the world as it appears from the client’s point of view, and avoid contributing to their oppression?
The Book we are using is READINGS FOR DIVERSITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE BY Maurianna Adams , werren J blumenfeld.
use 1 reference from this book
instruction is 3 books and/or academic journal articles to inform this paper
