Our home our Salford : transgressing the borders of social work education subtitle : in our back yard

Hesk, GCO; Syed, IA; Nkurunziza, W

Abstract

Founded on the emancipatory initiative ‘In our back yard’ which directly confronted ‘Not in our back yard’ attitudes and practice,s. Our Home Our Salford positioned community activism within the University of Salford, which effectively redirected the centrifugal forces of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ in community engagement. The Salford Forum for Refugees 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’. Utilising 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’ ‘performs what it names’ (Butler, 1997: 214). Focusing on the interpretation of the two words ‘centrifugal force’ this chapter deconstructs the metaphor of water; water as symbolic of asylum seekers and refugees who were flowing under and over and crossing community / university borders. tThis 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.

Citation

Hesk, G., Syed, I., & Nkurunziza, W. (2015). Our home our Salford : transgressing the borders of social work education subtitle : in our back yard. In M. Hill, A. Hudson, S. Mckendry, N. Raven, D. Saunders (OBE), J. Storan, & T. Ward (Eds.), Collaborate to Widen Participation: to, through and Beyond Higher Education (153-166). Forum for Access and Continuing Education (FACE)

• Acceptance Date: Jan 8, 2015
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Aug 14, 2015
• Pages: 153-166
• Series Title: Face and Contributors 2015
• Book Title: Collaborate to Widen Participation: to, through and Beyond Higher Education
• ISBN: 9781905858323
• Keywords: Community engagement, borders, experiential Learning, intersectionality, people seeking sanctuary
• Related Public URLs: http://issuu.com/faceconference/docs/annual-publication-2015_f87c81aa2e7a4c/1?e=5742677/14175040