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Questioning Case Studies: Subverting Social Work Education and Practice Through a Lens of Queer Irreverence

Reeder, Kelsey

Queer theory pushes us to resist normativity, question power structures, and strive for liberation. Queer-affirming practice encourages trauma-informed, consensual, accountable, and reciprocal care. Theoretically, the values of queer theory, queer-affirming practice, and social work are adjacent, if not intrinsically interconnected. However, social work education often relies on practices rooted in oppressive frameworks wedded to traditionally western and colonist socio-behavioral science standards that go unchallenged. For example, encouraging the appropriation of clients’ lived experiences for students’ learning and instructors’ teaching needs reinforces this complex, as this practice can be exploitative and reductive. Similarly, training social workers to engage clinical exercises without the transparent consent of their clients dehumanizes clients and reinforces imbalances of power. Inspired by Alex Iantaffi’s approach of irreverence in Gender Trauma and queer theory’s analysis of power, the practice of case studies (i.e. formulations, analyses, etc.) is questioned and subverted. Through an example of how the gatekeeping process of gender-affirming surgery letters can be practiced with “queer irreverence,” this piece offers tools for applying such irreverence in clinical practice, informing liberatory paths forward.

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Also Published In

Title
Studies in Clinical Social Work: Transforming Practice, Education and Research
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/28376811.2024.2419678

More About This Work

Academic Units
Social Work
Published Here
February 3, 2025

Notes

1. That which facilitates freedom to thrive outside of systems of oppression.

2. Dr. Tema Okun builds off of this list in a non-written webinar on White Supremacy Culture through the Society for Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI, Citation2022).

3. Black and Brown are capitalized in this piece to recognize the range of ethnic identities united by shared race and original land. As Columbia Journalism Review’s Alexandria Neason asserts, capitalizing Black is to “acknowledge that slavery ‘deliberately stripped’ people forcibly shipped overseas ‘of all other ethnic/national ties’” (Laws, Citation2020).

Notes on contributors:

Kelsey G. Reeder, LCSW-R (she/they) is a Clinical Social Worker, Advanced Practice PhD Candidate, Preceptor, and Writing Consultant at Columbia University School of Social Work, and Teaching Consultant in Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Kelsey has worked in therapeutic foster care, school social work, and community mental health. With post-graduate training from the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, she maintains a therapy and supervision practice focused on relationship challenges, family conflict, and the expansiveness of queer and trans experience. Kelsey spent six years providing clinical supervision to lifeline counselors supporting LGBTQ+ youth experiencing crisis or suicidality, and is an activist for care worker rights, healing, and community. Their research aims to subvert social work education and practice through lenses of queer irreverence and mess. She explores conceptualizations of care that contribute to or disrupt collective queer and trans liberation (community-based vs. institutional care) and how social work is taught and carried out in ways that position social workers as sites of social control within their own communities. Kelsey’s work looks at how this dynamic impacts the personhoods of the clinician and client, interrupts collective liberation by enforcing unidirectional healing, and stems from settler colonialism and white supremacy.