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  • Analyzing Digital Narratives as Global Social Work Texts:A Case Study of “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Social Worker”
  • Tara La Rose (bio)

“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Social Worker”1 created by tuber2 Wright Kan3 is a digital narrative text that serves as an example of social workers’ use of digital media technologies and internet-based social media sharing for critical reflection and resistance. Through Internet-based sharing, reflections and contemplations about workplace experiences that once remained personal and individual become digital texts available to a global audience. The accessibility afforded by Internet-based communication technologies fosters the potential for connections to be made between and among social workers across time and space.4 [End Page 181]

For social workers in Canada, this text challenges our understandings about the power of globalization and professionalization to promote particular values and beliefs and to produce superior practice outcomes.5 As a self-regulating profession, social work in Canada is tied into provincial/regional, national, and international regulatory frameworks. This system of regulation constitutes what it means to be a social worker and to practice social work,6 limiting the use of the title “social worker” to those who meet the formal educational and licensure requirements. While regulatory bodies may set out the ideals, individual social workers are responsible for actualizing these requirements in practice. In doing so, workers must negotiate a host of challenges and complexities, contexts which receive little acknowledgement from the regulatory organizations.7 The lack of acknowledgement of systemic barriers that limit workers’ capacities to fully actualize these idealized subjectivities may leave individuals with a sense that they are somehow failing as social workers.8

Digital media technologies, Internet-based social media sites (like YouTube), and the use of digital media storytelling enhance social workers’ capacity to create, distribute, and access representations about their work that are created by the people who do the work.9 “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Social Worker” is an example of this kind of representation. It is a text presenting notions of the contemporary challenges and contradictions facing social workers. These representations are important resources for promoting resistance to the individualization of workplace issues10 and to the denial of institutional barriers commonly promoted under neo-liberalism.11 The [End Page 182] possibility of social workers witnessing this kind of reflection promotes the potential these workers may consider how these examples relate to their own experiences and hence holds emancipatory opportunity.12 Furthermore, these representations may allow stereotypes about social work and social workers to be challenged, making room for experiential understandings of professionalization to be considered and alternative understandings of work life to be explicated.13

This paper considers the digital media story “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Social Worker” as a case study demonstrating the potential depth of meaning that may be made through the use of digital media storytelling. Here Anthony Baldry and Paul J. Thibault’s approach to multi-modal analysis is used to deconstruct meanings,14 demonstrating the ways globalization has not only made social work a transnational profession but has also made the problems facing workers in the field something that may be represented and recognized globally, potentially creating the conditions for the building of a kind of international social work solidarity.

Selecting the Text

Representations of social work, like those presented in “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Social Worker,” allow us to consider the meaning of globalization within our contemporary practice context. What constitutes this global practice is codified within documents created by organizations like the International Federation of Social Workers (ifsw) and the International Association of Schools of Social Work (iassw) who, together with the Social Development Council (sdc), have created “The Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development” (commonly referred to as The Global Agenda by social work organizations). By launching The Global Agenda at the Joint ifsw, iassw, and sdc world conference in Hong Kong in 2010, these organizations have laid claim to Hong Kong as an important global social work location, framing this place as the “nexus of globalized professional social work.” On this basis, consideration of “The Discreet...

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