Dislocating AOP: An Analysis of Anti-Oppressive Practice's Subject Positions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anti-Oppressive Practice (AOP) has become one of the most influential approaches to contemporary social work practice. Despite its widespread significance it seems that there is confusion, and a lack of consensus, regarding what AOP actually is. This research, therefore, examines how social work educators understand AOP in order to determine what AOP looks like and whether it has since acquired a fixed and defined identity. Data gathered from eleven qualitative interviews with social work educators at three Canadian universities revealed that AOP is understood as having nine core tenets; and yet, AOP is also understood as being a highly fluid and ambiguous epistemology. The research also showed that AOP's fluidity and ambiguity are not weaknesses to be resolved, but rather are intentional and purposeful as they enable it to resist and dismantle dominance, and pursue social justice. AOP's fluidity and ambiguity was theorized as mirroring the fluidity and ambiguity of human identities and identity categories-both resist being fixed and reified, as they are more than the sum total of these parts. In this regard, it is proposed that AOP can be understood as occupying multiple subject positions. Analysis of AOP's subject positions revealed that when AOP tends toward becoming fixed and fully known it becomes co-opted and compromised by structures of dominance and is used as a tool of oppression. In other words, when AOP is definitively located it ceases to be anti-oppressive. It seems, therefore, that we must constantly dislocate AOP through critical dialogue in order to ensure that it is a means of dismantling dominant structures of power and pursuing social justice.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".