Social Work and Marginalisation in India: Questioning Frameworks
This chapter outlines the relevance of Gramsci’s notion of common sense and hegemony and endeavors to delineate how professional social workers could use the Gramscian framework in making sense of the processes of marginalization. It will provide a lens t
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Social Work and Marginalisation in India: Questioning Frameworks Mohd Shahid
Introduction “Each case and each situation must be individualised,” argued Octavia Hill in her Letters to Fellow Workers (Hill, 1875; Kendall, 2000). However, the argument in this chapter is that the role played by hegemony in the making of a social reality and its meaning-making by people needs to be examined. Each case and each situation must therefore be examined through the lenses of language, hegemony, and common sense. Professional social workers are obliged to work in diverse sociocultural settings many of which may be diametrically opposed to their own personally cherished sociocultural ideals. It is also possible that the practice setting and the community relationship that exists within it may be so structurally rooted that professionals may be unable to locate structural inequalities and oppressive realities in a specific sociocultural context. India continues to witness virulent intolerance on the basis of caste and religious identities, aversion to diversities, and diminishing shared spaces. There is an increase in the incidence of conflicts on the basis of identity assertion and reactions to them, while age-old caste-based atrocities on people belonging to marginalised caste groups (now popularly and assertively referred to as Dalits) continue unabated. These are serious concerns for social workers and practices where they are employed. This is even more so when the social work fraternity at the global level is arguing for the empowerment M. Shahid (*) Department of Social Work, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 S. S. M. et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Work Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39966-5_43
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and liberation of people by engaging “people and structures” (IFSW & IASSW, 2014). The values of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility, and respect for diversities are projected as cardinal principles. This requires social workers to find ways to locate and uncover their own trappings, their own social constructions, their ways of seeing, their gaze, their own make-up as a product of a particular sociocultural historical reality, and their own understanding of the journey they have to make to become a professional social worker committed to the cause of social justice. This necessitates revisiting the ontology of social work (social work as a being, a professional practice) and what is involved in becoming a social worker. Historians now (subalterns) argue that it is important to search for ways to represent the remoteness in histories that are written (Pandey, 2013 p. 30, emphasis added). In similar vein the consistent concern of social workers should be excavating their own constructions and searching for ways to locate the marginalities rather than structuralities in practices where they are employed. This chapter argues, first, for the
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