Socially Committed Discourse Analysis and Social Work Practice

Derrida’s statement stays with me: “Je n’ai qu’une langue et ce n’est pas la mienne” (“I have but one language and it is not mine”). In Le Monolinguisme de l’Autre (1996), Derrida pointed to the disjuncture between a language spoken and loved, and a national identity that had been historically denied. Taking up that phrase differently, social workers are growing incredulous about the way they speak in social work, how they engage with language, and what they do for a living. Laura Epstein (1994, 1999) pointed out the mystifying use of language in social work that masks the agenda that social workers fulfill (as did earlier Rojek, Peacock & Collins, 1988). Epstein insisted on making visible the historical tensions between the language and the profession’s overt claims. Drover and Kerans (1992) have tried to redefine the main objectives of social policy as the making (or constructing) of claims, which presupposes stretching and reordering language to create new social realities. Whose language are we speaking, writing, negotiating in social work? What kinds of dispossessions, translations are we conducting?