Using Intersectional Experiences to Foster Awareness & Enhance Value Congruency

Overview: Challenging ourselves as social work educators and researchers, these presenters came together in an effort to dig deeper into living and working with integrity as a social worker upholding our professionals values and ethics, specifically those of social justice and the dignity and worth of all people.Proposal text: Background
Recent years of social upheaval forced many to see our world more accurately, as racialized and unjust for our Black and Brown colleagues and communities. To be clear, none of this is new. Yet, social work finds itself “grappling” with how to address social injustice indicative of disenfranchisement, oppression, and marginalization.
Social injustice is rampant throughout our social environment and embedded in policies and practices. Injustice anywhere threatens the emotional, psychological, financial, relational, professional, and/or physical safety for everyone. What is the appropriate response from social workers in these moments? How does self-determination and autonomy inform our response? How do we intervene to address injustice on behalf of others but avoid saviorism?

Process
Four female identified social workers with six decades of collective social work experience, varied fields of practice, academic experience, and diverse racial/ethnic, cultural, and class identities came together to explore their intersectional experiences (Crenshaw, 1989) and ways we show up for the most marginalized among us, including for one another. Social work ethics require us to actively promote social change efforts to support social justice (NASW, 2021). This mandate includes clients, and explicitly, our colleagues and community. In an effort to practice as we teach, this purposive exercise looked inward at ourselves as academics and researchers, so that we may come to students and teaching with integrity and competence upholding our social work values (NASW, 2021).

Method
Underscoring the importance and history of many marginalized experiences, this group made an intentional decision to approach the discovery process outside the confines of widely western and white ways of knowing and establishing knowledge. Implementing a non-traditional process, reminiscent of a combination of grounded theory Glaser and Strauss (1967)
and a process recording, hours of discussion were recorded, transcribed, and reflected upon to find themes of operating with integrity, supporting autonomy, and upholding social justice.

Lessons Learned
The participants unearthed foundational guiding principles for approaching the ways in which social workers show up for our clients, our communities and ourselves. Importantly, we suggest that this reflective process and explicit recognition of guiding principles is critical to developing a sense of self that aligns with social work values. Intentional and regular utilization of such principles is necessary to strengthen and maintain an ethical congruency (Grise-Owens, 2017). Finally, we challenge social work to confront the inconsistency of recognizing students who do not agree with our professional values and ethics, and yet continue to graduate as professional social workers, and what this ultimately means for the profession’s future.

References
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989 , Article 8.

Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.

Grise-Owens, E. (2017, June 12). Self-care A-to-Z: Fired up to spark self-care. The New Social Worker. https://www.socialworker.com/feature-articles/self-care/fired-up-to-spark-self-care/

National Association of Social Workers (NASW). (2021). Code of Ethics. NASW Press.