Our home our Salford: Transgressing the borders of social work education

Hesk, GCO; Nkurunziza, W; Syed, I

Abstract

Founded on the emancipatory initiative ‘In Our back Yard’ that directly confronted ‘Not in Our back Yard’ attitudes and practices and positioned community activist within the University of Salford which effectively redirected the centrifugal forces of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ in community engagement. The Salford Forum for Refuges and asylum seekers operates from within the university not outside of it. Built on the foundation of Black feminist theory ‘Our Home Our Salford’ transgresses discursive borders that constitute Western hegemonic constructions of ‘place, placement, displacement; location, dis-location; memberment , dis-memberment; citizenship, alienness; boundaries, barriers, transportations; peripheries, cores and centers’ (Boyce Davies 1994:53). Utilizing the tool of testimony whilst mindful of ‘the mechanics of the constitution of the Other’ (Spivak, 1988: 294) within the integration of social work theory and practice has created a ripple effect of change makers that inscribes and motivates autonomous social work student activism. The results demonstrate unequivocally the power of performativity so that a ‘word’ ‘perform what it names’ (Butler, 1997:214). Focusing on the interpretation of the two words Centrifugal Force this paper deconstructs the metaphor of water; water as symbolic of asylum seekers and refugees who were flowing under and over and crossing community / university borders this initiative confronts the positions of ‘outside in’ and the ‘inside out.’ ‘Our home our Salford’ performs Crenshaw’s (1989) theory of intersectionality as a mechanism for reconstituting oppressive centrifugal forces in order to expose and use the intersectional experience as a force for connectivity.

Key outcomes are:

Creation of a live project both for academics, external research partnership and for our students.
Concretely enables the interplay of the themes of human rights, social justice and emancipatory social work to be realized, with practitioners, community engagement and academics working together to develop a radical ‘politics of positioning’ (Haraway 1988:288

Citation

Hesk, G., Nkurunziza, W., & Syed, I. (2014, July). Our home our Salford: Transgressing the borders of social work education. Presented at Social Work Making Connections, Royal Holloway, University of London

• Presentation Conference Type: Other
• Conference Name: Social Work Making Connections
• Conference Location: Royal Holloway, University of London
• Start Date: Jul 26, 2014
• End Date: Jul 25, 2014
• Deposit Date: Sep 4, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 4, 2015
• Keywords: • Engaging and Involving Students in the Educational Endeavour; • Creativity in Social Work; • Making Connections in Social Work Education
• Publisher URL: http://jswec.net/2014/sessions/our-home-our-salford-transgressing-the-borders-of-social-work-education/
• Related Public URLs: http://jswec.net/2014/sessions/our-home-our-salford-transgressing-the-borders-of-social-work-education/
• Additional Information: Event Type : Conference; Funders : JSWEC