Theme Of Oppression In Social Work

In this course we have looked at many different things that pertain to how social workers do their jobs and how they affect society. However there are a few main themes that we appear to have come across. Those themes are: oppression, the government and the individual. All of these topics are looked at in different ways and all carry a different meaning to society as a whole based on how we learnt them. For starters oppression is a topic that gets covered a lot in social work practices, be it through direct mention or through being an undertone to the topic being discussed. I think the best time that it was brought up was in lecture with the guest speakers Marlene Dei-Amoah and Jean Samuel. What they said made a lot of sense to me. They described anti-oppressive techniques that social

When they were talking about marginalized groups, they had us participate in the discussion through having us list the ‘isms’ that create said marginalized groups. What we learned then was that the marginalized groups that fall victim to these ‘isms’ are forced to the outside of society, when the inside is where those who live by the so called social norms are (Lecture on oppression). It is the people on this inside of this circle that hold all the power (Lecture on oppression). What they did next I thought was brilliant. They put up a slide that listed the different ways that we could all socially identify ourselves one way or the other with, and had us classify where we felt we belonged in these different categories. The categories included: race, gender, class, age, sexual orientation, religion and our abilities/disabilities. Then we needed to think about how our answers for each of these sections affected us; were they advantages or disadvantages? I think that was a really important step in covering this topic because it made us reflect on ourselves, and therefore made us think about how marginalized groups are oppressed in everyday life. All the different