Oppression Pedagogy: Intergroup Dialogue and Theatre of the Oppressed in Creating a Safe Enough Classroom

ABSTRACT

Creation of a classroom environment safe enough for students to expess their perspectives, hear classmates views and engage in classroom dialogue remains a major challenge in social work teaching. Intergroup dialogue and Theatre of the Oppressed are two approaches that effectively meet these challenges. Intergroup dialogue offers a systematic method of creating safety, exploring and owning social identity, engaging in hot topics, and ally building. Theatre of the Oppressed promotes communications that allow creative delving into sensitive topics. Data are presented from a cohort of students in a social work undergraduate oppression class. An ethnographic method was implemented to review student responses to a pedagogical approach that combined intergroup dialogue and Theatre of the Oppressed. Data analysis revealed students’ increased self-reflection and perspective taking.     

Reflecting on gender equality in Muslim contexts in Oxfam GB

Gender inequality, faith and development are intrinsically linked, and the impact of religious beliefs and practices on gender inequality is an issue that cannot be ignored in development work. This article summarises the key discussions and findings of two workshops, held by Oxfam GB, on the challenges of working on gender equality issues in Muslim contexts. It explores some of the strategies Oxfam staff have used in their programmes, and highlights the challenges Oxfam will need to address as it develops this area of work further.     

Haunted Bodies: Commentary on Melanie Suchet's “Whose Mind Is It Anyway?”

This essay explores the enigmas of unconscious communication both in treatments and in parallel process in supervision. It extends the concept of intersubjectivity to overlapping dyads and systems. As supervisor in the case in question and as a commentator on Melanie Suchet's moving case report, I speak as observer and as participant. I consider the case material and the supervisory experience as a form of unconscious communication and of unconscious listening, and as an inevitable enactment. I argue that multiple unconscious spaces are activated in the analyst, the supervisor, and the analysand.     

Simple algorithms for the poisson modal cumulative probability

The paper presents and compares two new very accurate and simple pairs of approximations for the Poisson modal probability and modal cumulative probability; these have been used by Kemp and Kemp (1987, 1988) for the generation of Poisson pseudorandom variables with varying noninteger parameter by the method of one-sided search from the mode. The approximations are rational except for the square root of an integer or half-integer.     

Pleasure and Danger: An Appreciation of Muriel Dimen

ABSTRACT

In this essay I recall a 40-year experience knowing and working with Muriel Dimen. This is a reminiscence of a shared activist life in the late 1970s and 1980s and later our lives emerging in psychoanalysis and relational psychoanalysis after the mid-1980s. It is an appreciation of the particular turns and potent hot spots in Muriel Dimen’s evolving theorizing of sexuality and power, body and gender and culture from this point in the mid-1980s to her death in 2016.     

Trial and error: attending to language barriers in child welfare service provision from the perspective of frontline workers

This paper reports on a qualitative study that used focus groups to gather data from the perspective of child protection workers on their experiences in providing services to clients with limited English proficiency (LEP). The goals of the study were to understand processes of relationship building and service provision that could contribute to improved practice. Focus groups are ideal in obtaining data on how a group deals with particular situations and for understanding their decision‐making processes. Measures to ensure rigour and trustworthiness were taken throughout the study. Findings provide rich and multilayered insights into the complexity of providing services for families with LEP showing that agencies use bilingual workers as well as interpreters for services. Participants noted, however, that services continued to be inconsistent with unclear guidelines and training about how and when to access interpreters. Lack of training for bilingual workers was also identified. Confidentiality issues, barriers to engaging with clients, problems with the quality of interpretation and role confusion together with benefits including interpreters being cultural and language ‘conduits’ and links to culturally specific services; enhanced communication decreasing the possibility of inaccurate assessments and lessening power differentials; and help with workload were noted.