s for social change: T e politics of ope


UN Special Rapporteur’s searing report on poverty and policy in the UK (Alston, 2018), which highlighted how drastic cuts to community services were fuelling sharp rises in referrals to crisis and specialist teams, at the same time as the criteria for acceptance were tightening to manage squeezed budgets and spiralling waiting lists. As a community, we are skilled in approaches that “can abide by the rules but do it in ways that are relationally sensitive” (McNamee, personal communication, 2018). I suggest there is now also an urgent need to co-ordinate our resources and responses to further develop our “situated irreverence” (workshop participant, personal communication) to dehumanising demands. For if we know we cannot not communicate (Watzlawick et al., 1974), what is the meaning of not speaking out?


Aboutness, withness and getting out of the way


“No one should ever ‘speak for’ or assume


another’s voice… it becomes a form of colonisation” (Sinister Wisdom Collective, 1990,


cited in Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1995, p. 1) “We cannot aff ord ‘no go areas’ of the


imagination” (Anna Livia, cited in Wilkinson &


Kitzinger, 1995, p. 36) A long time ago, when I was 18 and


police ‘stop and search’ was again stoking anger in UK cities, I took my mum and dad to a performance by the black activist dub poet, Linton Kwezi Johnson. We were the only white people in the audience. In the ending Q&A, I asked what he would invite us to do next, individually and collectively? He craned forward to see who’d asked the question. “Ah,” he said. “... well... thank you for your concern, but it is not for you to do or speak on our behalf ”. I slid back into my seat, smarting. It was my fi rst invitation to consider the oppressive potential of well-meant performances of care, and I treasure it.


Context 164, August 2019 John Shotter’s work alerts us to the


ethical and creative potentialities of dialogue ‘with’ rather than ‘about’ our clients (Shotter, 2010). Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), bell hooks (2014) and Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) developments of intersectionality and Wilkinson and Kitzinger’s (1996) nuanced explorations of ‘othering’ in advocacy invite us all to consider when the most respectful and generative response is to step back, stay quiet or support processes that invite others forward. In the complex interweaving of our


social identities and power relations, we can strive to create opportunities for ‘withness’ and ‘being a participant’, while also asking ourselves whether we have sufficiently rich understanding of the situations in which we might intervene to comprehend the meaning for others of our intervention. A systemic praxis for social justice requires humility, radical responsivity and radical listening.


The creativity of anger “She talks of anger as impetus, as a


propelling rocket fuel, but ...you have to put it somewhere. For some people it goes into action, for others it goes into art, for some people it goes into both”. Margaret Atwood (author of T e


Handmaid’s Tale) on Ursula Le Guin’s About Anger (2017)


Yesterday, Hannah (not her real


name) told me how she knows she’s feeling more hopeful: “Because I’m getting angry”. Without anger, Hannah felt despair. With anger came her hope that change was possible. Like Hannah, Margaret Atwood and Ursula Le Guin, we can use anger at injustice as impetus, and do something with it. If it hangs around, as Le Guin remarks, it can fuel “not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness” (p. 138). And if we lose it, we risk slipping into inaction and despair.


Remembering Foucault’s Archeology


of Knowledge (1972), might we ask ourselves when our modality became so timid? Is an unintended consequence of professionalisation that, as our modality gains seats closer to the top table, we feel we must defend our positions and say nothing to upset? Or is it a misconstruing of ‘equality’ – that if we cannot act for all we must act for no one? Perhaps the current “network of discursive rules” (Foucault, 1972, p. 728) around practitioners and practice has leſt too many feeling powerless? In venturing beyond timidity, how


might we move toward positions of creative alternative rather than jejune ‘opposition’, where we risk being organised and limited by the very oppressive forces and discourses we aim to resist? How might we support each other in performance of and irreverence to our own ideas, so we don’t slip into fundamentalist belief in our own moral probity? As Marina Hyde (2018) points out, such belief is highly dangerous – it led Tony Blair into war.


Comfortable doesn’t mean ethical fi t


Another story. I was sharing a train


journey with other party goers aſt er a friend’s birthday celebrations. We were enjoying familiar conversations – the scourge of neo-liberalism on public services, the monetising of care, the cascading toxicity of T atcherism down the generations. As the train trundled home, I refl ected with a fellow partygoer that our talks had felt almost too comfortable, what Freire called “idle chat er... ‘blah’” (Freire, 1972, p. 68). He then asked a question that turned the conversation on its axis: “So what might happen if we asked instead what aspects of ourselves we share with Margaret, how we might recognise our own inner T atcher?” (Robin Shohet, personal communication, 2018). We refl ected on times we had held on to our certainties, our privileges, our


7


Towards systemic praxis for social change: The politics of practice and practices of hope


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