Unsettling Stories: Theorizing Representational Violence and Practising Dignity

Résumé

In this paper I examine how dominant social work discourses use representational violence to maintain binary helper/helped identities, often through evacuating relational or partially shared narratives that might instead be grounds for collaborative work and solidarity. I centre a practice example to interrogate the role that performative professionalism plays in representational violence. My argument is situated in the knowledge that there is no innocent ground from which to represent another’s story of violence, that representation is a process of producing the Other and mutually constitutive of the self (Macías, 2013). Drawing on Rossiter’s (1999) notion that justice requires representation, I conclude by considering the possibilities of transgressing dominant representational boundaries posed by the ethical dilemma of representing violence. I suggest that reproducing another’s experience of violence through representation might be disrupted by combining the theory of “unsettled practice,” one that denies totalizing representations, with Response-Based Practice to foreground a spectrum of representations of resistance and so centre fluid agentic being (Richardson, 2008; Richardson & Wade, 2009; Rossiter, 2011). While this paper centres a practice example, my argument is relevant to representation in research and is informed by a body of work that locates research as an important site of resistance to dominance (Brown & Strega, 2005). This paper argues that representing the violence that another has experienced through the act of critically reflecting on the re-telling of that violence may inform counter-representations that lead to social justice responses.