Weaving and Unraveling Dominance: A Critical Analysis of Personal and Professional Social Work Identities in Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis reports on findings from a critical qualitative study exploring and challenging normative notions of what it means to be a social worker. Throughout this thesis, I investigate how practicing social workers in Alberta negotiate their personal and professional identities. Drawing on 22 transcripts from semi-structured interviews with 11 unique participants, I analyze discursive strategies that are used to define and categorize what social work is and who social workers are expected to be. Grounded in critical and anti-oppressive theories and methodologies -namely Critical Disability Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis -I critique how dominance and power are woven into narratives of identity, belonging, and pride within the interview data. In particular, I critically illustrate how being a social worker is constructed in opposition to being a client. I conclude by reflecting on what social work could become when the rigid exclusionary boundaries of the profession are unraveled and reimagined. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the enormous contributions of my supervisor, Dr. Pamela Grassau, and my committee member, Dr. Kelly Fritsch. You have carved out and protected space for me to bring so much of myself to this work. Kellythank you for broadening my knowledge and understanding of disability and for pushing this work far beyond the expanses I ever imagined possible
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".