Reflection to Oppression and Social Work
What did you learn from doing this learning journal?
In the course of doing this learning journal I reflected on various material from the basis of sociological knowledge and was able to go beyond the “single story” of sociology, as argued by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her Ted Talk, to see the multidimensional nature of social work (2009).
Particularly, I was able to achieve the clear understanding of the following terms: ‘social justice’ and ‘human rights’. The term ‘social justice’ conveys the notion of the interrelated processes and goals aimed at achieving the vision of equality for all people and groups of people in the social life by the means that correspond to the standards of social equity and equal opportunities. As argued by Adams, et al., ‘social justice’ is based on a vision of a society, where all the resources are distributed according to the patterns of equity and all the participators in the social life are physically and psychologically safe and secure (2007).
Social justice requires the participants of the social life to be social actors with the sense of social responsibility in concern of the surrounding people, national and global society and the environment they are in. Thus, social actors have to be personalities with the strong sense of self –identity. According to Tatum, our identity is a very complex system comprising our reflections on our perceived representations of ourselves in the surrounding social, political, technological, economic and cultural environments (2013).
Therefore, social justice, as vision, is created in the interdependent system of interaction between an individual and society. Hence, the process of achieving the vision of social justice, omitting oppression, development of privileges and acknowledgment of diversities, is also very important. It should be aligned with the core values of the social justice vision, otherwise achieving this objective can be slowed down or deviated from the initial design.How does this learning relate to your learning about oppression, privilege, and diversity?As mentioned above the process of achieving the vision of social justice should correspond to the basic nation-building values due to the fact that social justice is created as an interaction between an individual and society. There are social phenomena, however, that establish challenges into the process of achieving social justice. These phenomena are the following: oppression, privilege, and diversity.
It can be assumed that oppression in society is connected with some kind of tyranny, which is executed by the power holding social group towards the oppressed group. In the contemporary social systems oppression is mostly connected with constraints on certain groups of liberal society, which is a result of a certain policy or even personal choices of the ruling group representatives. As argued by Young, oppression has five types, such as exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, culture of silence, cultural imperialism and violence (2013). Thus, oppression in the society takes various forms of the attempts of one group of people to make other group of people lack opportunities, which are essential for appropriate development of every …
