Northern Social Workers’ Experiences with Reflective Practice: Analyzing Power in International Development Work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Colonial histories, processes and experiences created conditions of inequality that continue to exist between the Global North and South and established a power dynamic that plagues international development work.Social workers who work in the international development sector are implicated in reproducing these unequal power relations through the operation and facilitation of this work.As such, they have been criticized for imposing their influence and knowledge in Southern contexts, while at the same time failing to critique the effects of Northern imposition on individuals and communities.Drawing on anti-oppressive social work practice, this project explores whether social workers' engagement with reflective practices impacts their understanding of their own positioning, power, practice strategies and negotiation with their managerial workplaces.Data was collected with the use of semi-structured interviews with Northern-trained social workers who work (or recently worked) for governments, international aid organizations, or as consultants across the Global South in the Middle East, Caribbean, Oceania, East Asia, Europe, and Africa.Participants revealed that powerful neoliberal ideas in the workplace and location-specific challenges constrained reflective practice activity.This research provides important insight and understanding into how Northern social workers working in the Global South grapple with their roles, responsibilities, identities, and positions.This study contributes research on the different possibilities for reflective practice within an anti-oppressive international social work practice framework and within international development work.These possibilities include a critical analysis of power as well as how such practices narrowed the gap between critical analysis of power and workers' practice orientation.iii Acknowledgements "the breaking leads to the opening the opening allows expansion the expansion creates more space the space invites growth in" (Doby, 2018, p. 35) I am deeply indebted to the participants in this study who shared their insights and stories, so others could learn from their experiences.Their contributions to this study will help to inform future dimensions of international social work and international development work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".