“Bursting Bubbles”

Recently, a student in my online graduate course on ethics in social work expressed dismay and shock over an article in which Kantian ethics were being interrogated for their racist character (see da Silva, 2011; Massara, 2007). The student felt betrayed by the racist beliefs of a philosopher who was so influential to his understanding of himself and his practice. A few days later, another student expressed similar dismay at a critique of Emmanuel Levinas’s Zionist inclinations and what it meant for an ethics of recognition of the other (see, e.g., Butler, 2009). Adhering to my commitment to a critical approach to teaching and social work—a commitment to poststructural, critical race, postcolonial, feminist, antiheteronormative, and critically self-reflective teaching and practice (de Montigny, 1995; Heron, 2005; Jeffery, 2005)—I replied to these students asking them to question where their feelings were coming from and what it told them about their own sense of self as a “good helpers.” Nevertheless, internally, I found myself recognizing these teaching moments as yet another moment in which I had burst someone’s bubble. In other words, my teaching practice and scholarly work once again resulted in one or more of my students feeling deeply unsettled and destabilized by the realization that everything they had believed to be true and just could, in fact, not be so.

As a racialized immigrant woman who has been teaching critical approaches to social work practice for most of the past 10 years, I have been responsible for many bubble-bursting moments. Students who have always believed that social work is a helping and benevolent profession become upset when they realize the dark past of social work and its embeddedness in power relations and the reproduction of conditions of injustice. They are distressed at the realization of social work’s role in colonial practices that have sustained the removal of Indigenous children first to residential schools and more recently to the child welfare system (Blackstock, 2009; Jacobs, 2009). They may also become uneasy about arguments that question feminist approaches to practice that by adhering to essentialist notions of the feminine either fail to see how gender is a contextually produced and contested social category or that any analysis that privileges gender but ignores race or class is bound to be limited and potentially unjust. Students may become even more unsettled when I argue that there are no places of innocence in which we, critical social workers, can stand outside historical and continuous injustices. We are always implicated and complicit, and good intentions are not a precondition for good practices; neither are bad ones a precondition of bad practice. As a result, uncertainty should be a political commitment rather than something to be feared (Rossiter, 2011).

In reflecting on these bubble-bursting moments, I have to recognize the cost that such teachings have for me as a racialized and gendered academic. Although I am fortunate to teach in the company of amazing critical white women, as some of the racialized women who came into academe before me have argued, women of color are particularly at peril when teaching in universities and professional settings that remain not only predominantly white but embedded in colonial, patriarchal, and racist ontoepistemologies (bell hooks and Patricia Monture-Angus come to mind). We tend to bear the brunt of patriarchal racism not only from students’ anger but from institutions that are steeped in white patriarchal power. I suggest that this peril is intensified by neoliberalization processes that are taking place in the university and practice settings that are producing subjects who understand themselves along market-driven technologies of self that result in students seeing themselves predominantly as consumers of education (see, e.g., Davies & Bansel, 2007; Giroux, 2002). Within a neoliberal market mentality, a racialized professor’s attempt to question social work being steeped in power can easily be subjected to disciplinary practices that originate from alliances between students who see themselves as consumers and educational institutions that are increasingly conceptualizing education through customer service approaches. I have experienced this neoliberal collusion, when, for example, students argue that critical race theory and material that interrogates their own implication in the white history of social work are not what they “are paying for.” I have also felt it when blatant incidents of racist and colonial hate speech are left unchallenged in institutional procedures that are committed more to “serving” students than to ensuring the safety of racialized professors, students, or even potential users of services.

Within increasingly neoliberalized university and practice settings, bubble-bursting moments are more likely to become no more than bubble-nudging moments in which students may momentarily feel unsettled but quickly recover and restabilize themselves in the certainty of a neoliberal commonsense that remains steeped in whiteness. Their restabilization within the context of a neoliberal university can have a high cost for me and result in the bursting of my own academic bubble. I continue to believe that education should lead to the kind of paradigm shifts that come only from moments of deep destabilization. Yet, to achieve these subject-changing moments, we necessarily need to interrogate politically the institutions and the social order within which we are teaching. I wonder what kind of academic and activist work white patriarchal neoliberalism is necessitating us to do. What kind of political alliances across academic and practice fields and with students should we aim for? And what kind of teaching practices should we explore if we are effectively to pierce through the apparently hard surface of the current social order?