How to convey social workers’ understanding to clients in everyday interactions? Toward epistemic justice

Abstract

A client’s experience of being heard and understood by a social worker contributes to not only fostering alliance and positive outcomes in practice, but also positioning the client as the knower of their own experience. One’s capacity to be recognized as a trustworthy conveyer of knowledge is essential to achieving a sense of human value. Philosopher Miranda Fricker describes this recognition as epistemic justice. When the client’s experiences are discredited/marginalized, epistemic injustice occurs. We apply these constructs to clinical social work practice to explore how social workers accomplish or fail at the task of empathically listening and conveying understanding to clients and subsequently, accomplishing or failing epistemic justice. Using Conversation Analysis, we conduct a turn-by-turn analysis of videotaped social work encounters in a community mental health agency. Our findings identify and illustrate the moment-by-moment discursive patterns in both epistemically just and unjust clinical social work encounters. The identified discursive patterns can be used for the clinical training of social workers, encouraging critical reflection on their own everyday conversations toward promoting epistemic justice. This study thus has implications for social work education as an illustrative example of making a link between micro practice skills and macro justice issues in social work.

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