In this thesis I have developed a theoretical framework using Michel Foucaults metaphor of the panopticon and applied the resulting discursive methodology to prominent risk assessment texts in Tasmanian Government child protection services. From the analysis I have developed an innovation poststructural practice of discursive empathy for use in child protection social work.
Previous research has examined discourses such as madness, mothering, the family and masculinity using Foucaults ideas and argued that each is a performance of social government. However my interest is in the best interests of the child as governmentality; risk as the apparatus through which it is conducted and child abuse its social effect. In applying a discursive analysis, practices of risk assessment are therefore understood to actually produce intellectual and material conditions favourable to child abuse, rather than protect children from maltreatment.
The theoretical framework produces in this thesis incorporates three distinct components of Foucaults interpretive analytics of power: archaeology, genealogy and ethics. These components provide a structure for discourse analysis that is also a coherent methodical practice of Foucaults notion of parrhesia. The practice of parrhesia involves social workers recognised that social power is subjectively dispersed yet also hierarchical. Using this notion I have analysed the best interest of the child as a panopticon and argued that child abuse is a consequence.
This thesis therefore demonstrates how child protection social workers can expose the political purpose involved in the discourse the best interests of the child, and in doing so challenge the hostile intellectual and material conditions that exist for children in our community. In concluding, I identify how discursive empathy is a readily accessible skill that social workers can use to practice parrhesia in a creative way.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/217253 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Rogerson, Thomas Stephen, thomas.rogerson@deakin.edu.au |
| Publisher | Deakin University. School of Social Inquiry |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.deakin.edu.au/disclaimer.html), Copyright Thomas Stephen Rogerson |
Page generated in 0.0019 seconds