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Qualitative Social Work
Copyright ©2009 Sage Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, Vol. 8(3): 305–320
www.sagepublications.com DOI:10.1177/1473325009337839
Four Scenes and an Epilogue
Autoethnography of a Critical Social Work
Agenda Regarding Poverty
Michal Krumer-Nevo
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
ABSTRACT
‘Back and forth autoethnographers gaze . . . outward on
social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then
. . . inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and
may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpret-
ations’ (Ellis and Bochner, 2000: 739). The article presents an
autoethnography in a format of four scenes and an epilogue.
The scenes move from personal family memories, through
memories of first professional encounters with a ‘poor’
woman client, and an encounter with volunteers from a
human rights organization that fight to eradicate poverty,
to an educational moment as a social work lecturer who
guides her students in their search for their own way to work
with people in poverty. The epilogue aims to connect the
four scenes and to point at the personal, social, cultural, and
political roots of a critical social work agenda regarding
poverty.
KEY WORDS:
autoethnography
critical social
work
narrative
poverty
research
ARTICLE
305
FIRST SCENE
My parents, my sister and myself, wearing our Sabbath best, are about to visit
my maternal grandparents. We are travelling from our apartment in Givataim,
Israel – which was then, in the sixties, a middle-class suburb, a socio-
economically homogeneous town of clerks, tradesmen, nurses, school and
kindergarten teachers – towards the one-room basement apartment of my
grandfather and grandmother. The distance is not great. My grandparents are
expecting us. My grandma sets our hair, with a comb dipped in perfume that
she pulls out of her own hair, and offers us food. Grandpa does not talk much.
My grandma bustles about us asking questions, offering answers, and observ-
ing, thus bringing the small apartment to life.
Our main interaction with Grandpa is helping him with his work. So,
silently, we are together. My grandfather peddles small cards on which the
traditional Jewish ‘prayer for the journey’ is printed. He walks among the people
waiting for the bus at the central station and sells the prayer cards in exchange
for pennies. The preliminary preparation and organization must be completed
at home. My sister and I help him insert the prayers into long plastic sleeves.
The plastic has to be cut to the right size, in a straight line. We have to staple
the two edges with a stapler, and put a rubber band around every group of
ready ‘prayers.’ Then we help grandpa sort out the coins he received through-
out the week from his customers. The large ones are one penny – grey, with
wavy edges. The five or ten pence coins are smaller. My father works as a bus
driver, so he brings along the heavy metal box in which bus drivers put the
fares they receive and we, the girls, arrange the coins inside. There are plenty
of coins and we fill the box, count the coins, empty the box and fill it again.
We arrange the counted coins in an orderly way in cloth bags. My grandfather
will go to the bank on Sunday to exchange the small coins, whose individual
value is close to nothing, into larger coins or bills.
I remember very vividly the tiny flat in which my grandparents lived
until the end of their lives. I also remember the house or rather shack in the
poor neighbourhood in which they lived when I was younger. My grand-
parents were both born in the year 1900 in what was then Palestine. My
grandmother was orphaned at the age of four. Her parents arrived in Palestine
as pioneers, and died some years later of malaria within a few days of one
another, leaving behind five toddlers, my grandmother being one of them. The
five children were brought up in an orphanage. My grandfather unsuccessfully
tried his hand at various businesses. Neither of my grandparents received much
education. I still remember the newspaper they used to read, a newspaper with
large characters and vowels, reminiscent of children’s books.
My mother left school after finishing elementary school. She worked
from the age of 14 as a salesgirl in a butchery shop. For one year she managed
to work during the daytime and take evening classes. But later she stopped
306 ■ Qualitative Social Work 8(3)
studying. At the age of 20 she began working as a typist and secretary in a well-
known legal company, where she continued until her retirement. Through her
lifelong employment and her marriage to my father, my mother succeeded in
distancing herself from the poverty of her childhood.
I was born to a different type of family than my mother. Both my parents
worked and we lived in a middle-class neighbourhood with good schools, parks
and services. My family was very similar to my classmates’ families. I do not
recall any particular economic differences between the houses I visited, and if
there were, I do not remember them as being significant. My mother loved to
tell us about her childhood. Similar to many people who experienced child-
hood poverty and succeeded in surmounting it, she believed that personal
responsibility and hard work are the best means to overcoming poverty, and that
they are accessible to all. Those who remain poor do not take responsibility for
their own fate, do not make the ‘right’ rational decisions and are not prepared
to assume the effort entailed in working.
Had I listened to my mother, I would have avoided any dealings with
poverty and would have found no interest in it, especially not in the people
who live in poverty. My mother hated the fact that she grew up in a neigh-
bourhood considered poor and was ashamed of her early circumstances. She
particularly concealed her elementary schooling. She taught me the importance
of education, but above all, the importance of ‘looking nice, dressing well, and
speaking good language’. Those traits were, according to her worldview, the
ticket to the realm of ‘better people’ – wealthy and middle-class people. She
was always concerned with distinctions between someone with status and
someone without status, and identified always with those she considered socially
powerful. Those perceived as lacking social status were of no interest to her.
If I inherited something from her in this respect, it was an understand-
ing of, and a sensitivity to the deep sense of shame that for many people like
my mother, is ineluctably bound up with a state of poverty and social margin-
ality. For some reason, the message she tried to convey to me through endless
conversations about discriminating between those who are ‘our kind’ (Israeli
born, bourgeois) and those who are not ‘our kind’ (Eastern Jews, new immi-
grants, the poor) was not passed on to me as she intended. Possibly, the influ-
ence of this legacy may be perceived in my choice of social work as a profession.
My basic, deep seated identification was never with the powerful or with those
in possession of high social status. On the contrary, it was with those on the
margins of society, who have no visible social power or success, or with those
whose positive capabilities gain no recognition.
SECOND SCENE
Years after my grandparents had passed away I graduated university with a degree
in social work. At the hostel, in which I worked with youth ‘at risk’, I met
Krumer-Nevo Four Scenes and an Epilogue ■ 307
Sima, the mother of Yoram, who had been removed from her care when he
was but a few months old. Yoram, who was 16 when I met him, grew up in
foster families and ‘children’s homes’. By that time he had already been expelled
from all existing educational frameworks, those offering special education as well
as those offering vocational education. The youth hostel staff looked for suitable
employment opportunities for him – a welding workshop or a carpentry
workshop, for example. Ideally, the staff hoped to find a training framework or
some sort of apprenticeship in which the ‘employer’ would have a therapeutic
attitude and would assume the roles of a counsellor, a father or an older brother
as well as the traditional roles of the employer. Yoram was angry, sometimes
violent, always unpredictable. During one of our conversations he described the
unfolding of his life: ‘When I was eight I was in a children home and my
mother came to visit me four times; the following year she came three times
and last year she didn’t come at all’. Although she seldom came to visit her son,
Sima was well known to the hostel staff – by no means a favourite. In fact, she
was not well liked at all. Yoram was removed from her custody because she had
abused him immediately after his birth. Rumours said that in the past she had
worked in the sex industry and blamed her for having a sexual relationship with
her eldest son, who was 19 and had served a jail sentence by the time I met
the family. Throughout the years, she had refused to cooperate with the staff
and therapists at the various institutions in which Yoram was staying.
My first ‘meeting’ with Sima was via the telephone. I was the new social
worker. She was furious: ‘You took away my child and for what? What came
out of him? A good-for-nothing who doesn’t study, doesn’t work, doesn’t do
anything, problematic. You told me that I couldn’t raise him but I see that you
haven’t been too successful either’. She screamed rather than talked and seasoned
her speech with curses and threats. For some reason I liked her. I had the sense
that I could learn from her something I had not known before, something that
was not taught at the university. What I could potentially learn from Sima was
the existence of a viewpoint different from mine. Hers was a mirror image of
my professional worldview, shaped according to the dominant professional trends
at the time. This professional worldview used a narrow definition of the ‘best
interest of the child’, which preferred out-of-home arrangements rather than
partnership, empowerment and community building for the best interest of the
family. According to this narrative, abusive and neglecting mothers were ‘bad’
and ‘dangerous’ and social workers’ role was to ‘save’ their children from their
harm (for a critique on this perspective see Freeman, 1996; Ronen, 1998;
Scheper-Hughes, 1987; for a presentation of critical social work practice in the
area of child protection see Pinkerton, 2002). Sima’s story was totally different.
From her point of view, the social workers were the ones who had failed in
educating Yoram, after having taken him away from her, against her will, under
the guise of care for his welfare and future. Had they left the child in her
308 ■ Qualitative Social Work 8(3)
custody, and had he then left school, or become involved in some criminal
activity, the welfare authorities would undoubtedly have blamed her. Now it is
she who blames them, and me. From Sima’s perspective, the welfare authorities
did not succeed in educating Yoram any better than she would have done, had
she been given a chance to do so. She said, ‘I’ve been treated by social workers
for forty years and what have I got from it?’, counting the long years during
which she had been known to and treated by the welfare authorities as though
she were counting years of tenure at a place of employment.
From the viewpoint of many social workers, these accusations were
ridiculous. Throughout the years they had been beside themselves trying to help
Sima and Yoram. The same accusations that she threw in their faces could be
turned against her, and quite easily. The file carrying her name at the welfare
department was quite bulky. It recorded the dozens of instances when she had
received material help – to help pay for dental care, to purchase a stove, to
receive gas, or a fridge, to help her receive a discount in municipality taxes, or
water utilities, or in tackling her housing problems. It also recorded countless
conversations in which attempts were made to explain, or threaten, or under-
stand, or change. These efforts resulted in no success. Although she continued
abusing Yoram for years when he came to her during occasional holidays she
would resist any attempt to hand him over for adoption while he was still young
enough for that to be a viable solution for him. Now that he is older he spends
his vacations wandering the streets. He misses home during his stay at the hostel
and finds it intolerable when he does visit. Sima does not work and lives off
monthly welfare benefits. She is full of accusations towards others but refuses
to realize how her own choices, decisions and actions have influenced her life.
She is considered ‘untreatable’ – a definition not to be found in professional
textbooks but often used in popular professional jargon.
The dominant professional point of view thus regards Sima’s story as the
story of a failure. The fiasco is first and foremost hers. According to a psycho-
pathology perspective, Sima is dependent, passive, lacking perseverance and any
disciplined working habits, has external locus of control and very limited ego
strengths. She is the realization of the culture of poverty (Lewis, 1968). That is
why she is unemployed, dependent upon the meagre welfare benefits, and
constantly blaming others for her circumstances. She lacks the capacity for intro-
spection and insight and consequently is unable to benefit from a therapy that
would aim at bringing about an intra-psychic change. According to this narra-
tive, Sima is a compilation of pathology, deficiencies, difficulties and problems.
An alternative viewpoint, however, is offered by Sima herself, and
produces an entirely different story. According to this narrative, it is the social
workers, and society at large, who are to be held responsible for her and for
Yoram’s dire situations. Sima regarded me, other social workers and social insti-
tutions as the failures. When she said, ‘I’ve been to the welfare bureau for forty
Krumer-Nevo Four Scenes and an Epilogue ■ 309
years and what did I get?’ she was expressing frustration at the fact that the
lengthy treatment did not bring about a real change, but only limited local aid.
Sima expressed a critical view of society and its representatives, the social
workers. She told ‘the other story’, a critical, counter story (Harris et al., 2001)
– an alternative narrative, counterpoint to the hegemonic, controlling,
professional one.
Although some critical social work has been developed in UK, Canada
and in some schools of social work in Australia, no critical schools of thought
(post-modernist, feminist, radical, anti-oppressive) were taught in social work
curriculum in Israel in the 1980s. Lacking a comprehensive critical conceptual
framework, I did not have sufficient knowledge and skills to fully understand
Sima’s narrative. Nevertheless, I clearly felt its power, and in the course of our
conversations, which eventually developed into a real relationship and replaced
the yelling, cursing and threatening, the existence of another viewpoint, and
its details, became clearer. My intuitive identification with the weak, and my
rebellious and critical attitude towards the normative ‘order’, consisting of
arbitrary hierarchies, led me to realize, even before I properly understood, that
my professional viewpoint forbade the acknowledgement of even the possibility
of an alternative perspective and prevented me, furthermore, from apprehend-
ing the totality of Sima’s stance.
THIRD SCENE
One autumnal Saturday morning I am strolling in the company of Bruno
Tardieu in Jerusalem. Bruno, a Frenchman, is a ‘permanent volunteer’ in ATD
Fourth World Movement (see Rosenfeld, 1989; Rosenfeld and Tardieu, 2000;
http://www.4thworldmovement.org). This is not his first visit to Jerusalem. This
time he came to deliver a speech at a professional conference. The Fourth World
Movement is an international civil rights non-governmental organization,
centred in France, which fights to eradicate poverty and to actualize the rights
of those who live in extreme poverty. It is a very special movement based on
a nucleus of about 350 permanent volunteers who devote their full time
throughout the years to the movement (and receive a very small salary); a large
group of Fourth World Families are people who live in poverty who have
become activists in the framework of the movement; and there is an even larger
group of allies, who support the movement. The movement works simul-
taneously to create partnerships with people living in poverty through the direct
actions of the permanent volunteers, and to change policy regarding poverty at
the highest levels on which such policy is determined. Its members initiate and
participate in the legislative efforts combating poverty in various European
governments, and as a counselling body for the United Nations and UNICEF.
The volunteers include families that have spent several years in deprived
310 ■ Qualitative Social Work 8(3)
neighbourhoods in various countries throughout the world, and have sub-
sequently resided in Zurich or New York as emissaries of the Movement to
the United Nations.
Half a year prior to Bruno Tardieu’s visit to Jerusalem, I spent a week
at the Movement’s headquarters near Paris. I was extremely impressed by its
members’ work methods. The term ‘work’ is not quite appropriate since the
reference is to volunteers who themselves live in the poor neighborhoods, and
initiate various projects in conjunction with the neighborhood residents. Their
‘work’ is not based on a condescending or patronizing outlook or ‘from an
above downwards’ perspective. They do not see themselves as those who know
what is to be done in order to escape poverty or in order to transform the life
of those who live in poverty into a life of ‘honour’. Although they possess
priceless knowledge and expertise concerning poverty, they do not display it.
They do not ‘educate’ the people with whom they are in contact. On the
contrary, they attempt to create joint ventures or partnerships, acting from an
authentic sense of cooperation and partnership with the people, suspending
their prejudices and their proficiency, in order to enable the generation of a
truly shared knowledge.
While strolling, I told Bruno about the history of the poor neighbour-
hoods in Jerusalem. Bruno speaks only French and English. Wandering about
the peaceful streets we suddenly found ourselves standing beside a small football
field. It was an improvised playground surrounded by a high fence. We could
not see the entrance. There were some children, on the verge of adolescence,
playing on the field while we were standing outside. Like other members of
the Movement, Bruno is an expert in creating relationships and alliances. But
how could a temporary visitor, who does not speak the language, create any
kind of relationship with teenagers on a playground? Bruno does not question
whether it is worthwhile establishing a relation with children. He simply acts
spontaneously, in a way that integrates naturally with the everyday quality of
the situation. We were standing by the playing field and talking. But Bruno was
also observing the field. Suddenly, a child kicked the ball past the goalpost. Goal!
Bruno applauded. The children, who had not noticed us beforehand, lifted their
heads with a smile and went on playing.
This episode is minute, trivial, not necessarily related to poverty, but it
may shed light on the basic stance of the volunteers working for the Fourth
World Movement. They behave in a respectful, humane way in circumstances
that for other members of society, including professional social workers would
require special efforts. In their encounters with marginalized members of society,
considered in most cases and by most people to be ‘failures’, members of the
Fourth World recognize their powers and their capabilities that are worthy of
respect and appreciation, and they focus precisely on those. This is not always
simple: the language of people living in dire economic conditions may be
Krumer-Nevo Four Scenes and an Epilogue ■ 311
jumbled or stuttering, and sometimes they flaunt their forlornness as though it
were their visiting card. But Fourth World volunteers wait patiently until some-
thing remarkable emerges, and then they concentrate on relating to this trait.
Thus, focusing their attention on a particular attribute, they enhance its presence.
FOURTH SCENE
‘One of my clients, a twenty-five year old woman, a mother of three, requested
financial assistance in order to purchase a dining room table and chairs. Her
financial situation is severe indeed; there are almost no unbroken chairs in her
house that one can sit on’, Dorit, a social work student, tells her classmates. ‘I
managed to get a check for her to buy the table and chairs from a furniture
shop that works with the welfare department. You know how hard it is today
to get these checks, because of the budget cuts. We went together to the shop
to see what they have there. It turned out that they offered her only a certain
kind of table and chairs, the kind they customarily supply to those who apply
to them through the welfare department. She said she didn’t want them. They
weren’t nice in her opinion, and they didn’t seem to be of good quality. The
legs of the chairs were made of metal, rather than wood, and she didn’t like
this. The thing is, I have at home the very same dining room chairs and table
which she refused to take. In my opinion, the chairs are fine; they are sturdy,
well-built and comfortable, and they do their job. It was hard for me to decide
what to tell her, and I’m not sure that I’m required right now to fight wind-
mills to get her other furniture.’
During the last several years I have taught students a core course, entitled,
Social Work Methods with Individuals. During the course, students undertake
their initial experiences as social workers working in the field. They are assigned
to work in social agencies that focus on diagnosing and intervention, and they
are expected to work with three to five clients. Clients turn to the social agencies
for a wide cluster of reasons, requests, motivations, needs, and expectations, and
the students are expected, during a process that lasts several months, to estab-
lish a working relationship with them, to understand the problems they are
confronting, to assess their difficulties and their capacities, and to assist them on
alleviating their distress. Each year I witness the change that takes place in the
class’ atmosphere as the year progresses. In the beginning the students express
great enthusiasm at the possibility of helping people in distress. Some of them
possess political awareness and aim ‘to change the world’. Others are more
oriented to individual counselling or psychotherapy. In either case, it seems to
them that aiding persons in need is a more-or-less straightforward process. The
person asking for help has a specific problem, she asks our help in order to solve
that problem, and, if we know how to solve it, we will offer her our help
and she will act upon it. Although it is also possible to hear misgivings and
312 ■ Qualitative Social Work 8(3)
apprehensions, doubts and lack of confidence, the atmosphere at the beginning
of the school year is fraught with good will, enthusiasm, and readiness to enlist
for the benefit of people in need. However, during the year, through acquaint-
ance with their clients, it becomes apparent to the students that the processes
of establishing professional relations and of giving assistance are not simple or
direct, and that they demand from the students an enormous amount of personal
involvement.
Dorit’s story sheds light on some of the difficulties of working with
women living in poverty. They come to the welfare department for various
reasons. Most of them seek material aid – to purchase household equipment,
school equipment or assistance in obtaining alternative public housing or in
registering a child in day care. Although some of the explicit requests seem
‘technical’ and easy to fulfil, as the relationship between the student and the
client progresses, the scope and complexity of the problems often become
apparent, and they are significantly more convoluted than those declared as the
basis for the initial request for help. During the meetings with these women,
their children and families, the extent to which the problems are intertwined
with one another, with their connection to the social systems and with social
and family patterns and modes of life becomes apparent. Therefore, it also
becomes evident that in order to effect change it is necessary to work with
both heart and mind, to master different kinds of knowledge and to activate a
network of professional skills. A prerequisite to effective aid in such circum-
stances is critical self-reflection (Fook, 1999), e.g. the understanding of one’s
own responses to the client and of the subjective meaning of the client’s behav-
iour. Students find it hard to understand the client when she acts in a way that
seems to the student as ‘irrational’, or when she behaves in ways that, in the
student’s opinion, reflects self-destructive tendencies. Students find helping to
be very difficult when they do not understand the client’s behaviour or when
they themselves feel hurt or insulted. For instance, if the client regularly fails
to appear at prearranged meetings, or when she lies to them, or conceals infor-
mation that the students ultimately receive from another source, or when the
client purchases a bicycle for the child with funds that the student raised so that
she may pay her debts at the grocery, or when she and her children continue
sleeping on mattresses after they managed, with great effort, to obtain for her
a check to purchase beds.
Dorit’s story reminded me of another story I read in a beautiful article
by Lucy White, a professor at Harvard Law School. In her article White (1991)
describes her meeting with a woman she calls ‘Ms G.’ during her work as a legal
aid lawyer at a community centre. Ms G. was an African-American single mother
of five daughters, who lived on an AFDC. She asked for legal assistance after
she was ordered to return a sum of money (twice as high as her monthly
income) that she had received in the past as compensation for a car accident
Krumer-Nevo Four Scenes and an Epilogue ■ 313
she had been involved in, and that she had already spent. The story has many
interesting details that are not directly relevant here, but finally, after thorough
consideration of the alternatives, White decided to argue that the woman spent
the money solely to buy basic consumer goods, as defined in federal regulations
as ‘life necessities’. Ms G. agreed. The claim was based on the fact that, as Ms
G. tells the lawyer, with the money received she bought some basic necessities
including new everyday shoes for her school aged daughters whose previous
pairs were so shabby that they had become a source of mockery on the part
of their classmates. The discomfort described by White in advancing this
argument stems from the fact that it forces the woman to reveal herself in all
her humiliation and weakness, as someone who is unable to provide for her
children’s most basic needs. During the hearing, however, the picture is turned
upside down since when asked what she bought with the compensation money,
Ms G. proudly answers that she bought her daughter Sunday shoes for church.
Since Sunday shoes are not considered a basic need product, it appeared as if
she would lose her case. Lucy White is angry, and describes with great honesty
her difficulty in accepting the woman’s action, which goes against the judicial
line they had agreed upon. Later White realizes that the woman’s answer in
court, which curtailed her chances of winning at the hearing, was in fact an
expression of her refusal to appear as a weak and helpless victim. It had enabled
her to present herself as an autonomous person possessing self-respect. In
Bourdieu’s (1986) terms, the woman risked the material capital offered to her
by the social agencies for the sake of a symbolic capital – self-respect and
self-definition.
The difficulty White describes in understanding Ms G.’s behaviour is
similar to the difficulties that social workers and social work students confront
and deal with on a daily basis.
EPILOGUE
The first steps of my critical awareness were the vivid memories of lived
experience, which I acquired in my family, and the counter narrative Sima told
me. These two taught me, although from different angles, that the hegemonic
narrative, which sees poverty as an individualized problem, the result of mistakes,
faults and deficits of the poor themselves, is but one story (for the con-
servative, hegemonic narrative regarding people in poverty and the critique of
this narrative see, for example, Wilson, 1987).
My childhood memories gave me some preliminary exposure (although
not direct and somewhat distant, through my mother) to the lived experience
of life in poverty, and taught me the power of shame that can develop in con-
nection to poverty. From my mother I learned how abusive the hegemonic
story could be. How it influences people’s own experiences, hurts their
314 ■ Qualitative Social Work 8(3)
self-perception, and creates what Goffman (1963) calls ‘spoiled identity’. Spoiled
identity is a response to labelling and stigmatization exerted upon individuals
through the hegemonic narrative either by the general public discourse or
through negotiation with others around them. Goffman had introduced the
notion of spoiled identity to account for the sense of lack of credibility that
is conveyed to stigmatized individuals and which in turn develops in them
negative self-experiences that often revalidate the stigma. My mother used firm
boundaries and categories as a defence against any inclusion of herself in the
group of people who live in poverty. I did not need such a defence, since I was
brought up in a better socio-economic situation, and I was free from the experi-
ences of stigmatization that are connected to poverty. Yet, these traces of lived
experience on the one hand, and the relative socio-economic wealth of my
childhood on the other, may have given me the ability to listen to Sima. From
Sima’s complaints, yelling and curses I heard her sense of inferiority in the face
of a big structure. She was the one who taught me what an institutional struc-
ture is and how powerful it can be. I learned from her three principles of critical
social work. The first was that personal problems deserve structural analysis; the
second was that social services serve functions of social control (Fook, 2002,
2003); and the third was the importance of one’s social location for the narra-
tive one develops (Collins, 1998). She put her argument of blaming the social
services for her misfortunes so consistently that she convinced me. It was para-
doxical, of course, because it was easy to refute her argument. But something
in the way she believed in it made it truth, and caused me to ask ‘structural’
questions: Are there any structural reasons for her being poor? Would she get
the same response from social services if she were middle class? Is there any
chance that she was not heard by social workers precisely because she was poor?
Marginal? Is there any connection between the fact that most of social workers’
salaries are paid by the state, and the professional tendency to defend the current
structure?
Throughout the years, I witnessed countless occasions in which women
and men in poverty were ignored. I do not refer to occasions in which their
opinion was not accepted, but to instances in which their very right to express
a voice was nullified. From Sima I learned what a hegemonic narrative is and
what a counter narrative, the perspective of the marginalized, is. Her marginal
social location and her ways of communication (which can be understood as a
manifestation of a spoiled identity) made it easy to ignore her, or to treat her
sayings as ‘noise’, rather than a ‘voice’ or ‘knowledge’. Standpoint theory teaches
us that those who are located at the margins of society hold a unique perspec-
tive and insightful knowledge both regarding poverty and regarding the
deficiencies and limitations of social institutions, structures, policy and practice
(Collins, 1998; Smith, 1987). It is exactly what was considered in the hegemonic
narrative as their ‘fault’ – their marginality – which makes their perspective
Krumer-Nevo Four Scenes and an Epilogue ■ 315
important and necessary for public discourse (Krumer-Nevo, 2005). Peter
Beresford, Ruth Lister and their colleagues call to include the perspectives of
people in poverty into poverty debate (Beresford, 2000; Lister et al., 2000). They
call to acknowledge people in poverty as having specific knowledge, which
includes in addition to experiences also perspectives, interpretations, meanings,
hypotheses, analyses and theories (Beresford, 2000). My intuitive recognition that
what Sima said was not an expression of pathology or a waiving of responsi-
bility, and that it was not only a personal voice but also an expression of a
legitimate perspective and knowledge regarding structural, political issues, was
new to me. It led me to the recognition of the existence of two narratives; one
dominant, self-confident, anchored in the professional discourse and based on
the mechanisms of social institutions; the other – that of those living in poverty
– marginalized, lacking legitimization, ignored, denied and repressed by the
dominant discourse. The counter narrative is told in a language that is at times,
laboured and ungrammatical, and at other times, clear and fluent; sometimes
presenting an argument in a reasonable and logical manner, and sometimes
distracted by anger and recriminations, or by the despair and impotence with
which they struggle.
Meeting Bruno Tardieau and other volunteers from the Fourth World
Movement gave realization to the critical ideas. It was the first alternative I met
to social work practice as I knew it from the social services, which are part of
the municipal or national services.
1
The differences between the social work I
knew and the movement’s agenda, actions and way of thinking were enormous.
It was the difference between traditional, conservative social work that is carried
out in bureaucratic, governmental institutions and a human rights movement,
which implied critical thinking and practice. Critical social work practice high-
lights engaging with context, with critical knowledge and with ourselves in an
ongoing self reflection (Adams, 2002). It also highlights values such as clients’
self-determination, empowerment and the breaking of hierarchical relations in
favour of partnership (Shardlow, 2002). In the Fourth World Movement people
in poverty were not ‘clients’, but the people whose partnership volunteers were
seeking in order to influence together social policy at the national and inter-
national level. They were called ‘Fourth World Families’ and became members
of the movement. Father Joseph Wresinski, who founded the movement, based
its activities on the notion that poverty is too hard a situation for a person to
deal with by herself. The movement’s volunteers do not see changing the
people’s behaviour as their goal, rather they aim at social change, at changing
social institutions and social structure. Their practice emerged from a contex-
tual, structural understanding of poverty, and from a deep awareness of the ways
poverty acts in the social realm, and hurts social relations, for example, through
lack of respect, stigmatization, and lack of political power (Lister, 2004). The
movement defines poverty as a violation of human rights (Wresinski, 1994) and
people in poverty as citizens equal to all other members of society. By contrast,
316 ■ Qualitative Social Work 8(3)
Michael Katz (1995) documented the many ways in which social institutions
and services have aimed to change the poor and to ‘educate’ them.
The third scene is but a small anecdote revealing the volunteers’ attitude
as it has been manifested in practice. Although it does not exemplify the struc-
tural component of their work, it is a good example of the attitude of critical
practitioners – an attitude of one who sees the other very carefully, who
responds to strengths and agency and not necessarily to pathology, who takes
the initiative of becoming closer, and who finds the way to join the other in
his or her own world.
The fourth scene raises different questions. Dorit was confronted with
issues of power and representation that were familiar also to other professionals,
such as lawyers, educators, or psychologists. How should she understand her
client’s refusal to take the furniture? And how should she represent her after
this refusal? Using a critical perspective, Dorit can understand her client’s behav-
iour as a search for self-determination, and respect, similar to the search for
symbolic capital of Ms G. In order to gain this kind of understanding, Dorit
should confront her own emotional response to her client through critical self-
reflection (Fook, 1999). The fact that Dorit herself had at home the same kind
of furniture her client refused to take, made the whole situation much more
personal and difficult to handle.
One can think that social workers will lead social change, and social
work scholars will be the leaders of critical poverty research because of the
commitment of the profession to people in poverty and to social justice (British
Association of Social Workers [BASW], 1996; Hare, 2004; National Association
of Social Workers [NASW], 1999) and the close contact of social work prac-
titioners with clients living in poverty. However, radical social work, or its
more current variations – critical or progressive social work – have not gained
centrality in social work discourse. In a review essay, Edward Scanlon (2005)
criticized social work scholars for abandoning studying poverty from a critical,
politicized and historical perspective. He uses Piven and Cloward’s Regulating
the Poor as an example of research that derives from an intellectual process that
combines theorizing and practising with the poor in an effort to affect social
change, and regrets the fact that social work scholars are far removed from oppo-
sitional social movements. He mentions two general processes, not necessarily
relating to social work per se, as the reasons why social work scholars have
turned their back on critical poverty research. First is the shift of poverty research
from a political economy focus to research of the culture or behaviour of the
poor themselves, a shift that is compatible with the funds’ interests (O’Connor,
2001). The second reason he mentions is the tendency of social work scholars
to limit their writing to short articles instead of writing books, a trend that
results from the research-industrial complex. One can add to these the
professional socialization of social workers, which emphasizes individualized
perspective rather than structural, politicized one (Larochelle and Campfens,
Krumer-Nevo Four Scenes and an Epilogue ■ 317
1992; Waldegrave, 2005). Such discourse conceals the nature of poverty as a
phenomenon that is, to a large extent, beyond individual control. Existing
programs of social work education address problems of poverty and social
exclusion in an extraordinarily superficial manner. A recent examination of the
curriculum of the graduate programs at the top 50 schools of social work in
the USA found that a mere 12 schools offered one or more courses in the field
of poverty and overall, 15 courses existed on the topic (Harding et al., 2005). In
Israel, Guttmann and Cohen (1992), who examined the BSW programmes in
the early 1990s, found that the topic of poverty was hardly dealt with. Similarly,
Davis and Wainwright (2005), addressing the training for Diploma in Social Work
in Britain, criticized the tendency to avoid tackling the issue of poverty in the
curriculum and claimed that, in essence, such evasion indicates estrangement
from the inherent values of the profession. The present lack of concern with
poverty in general does not give much hope for the development of critical
social work agenda regarding poverty.Yet, there are still some points to remember.
Due to intimate client contact, social workers know about life in poverty
more than any other human service professionals. Clients of social services see
in social workers the professionals who are closest to them. They wish social
workers to be their advocates, to bring their voice, their knowledge and their
struggles with poverty into the general discourse (Krumer-Nevo and Barak,
2006). This is a challenge for social work practitioners and scholars alike. Social
work needs politicized, historical research and practice that is grounded in the
lived experiences of people in poverty and in the lived experiences, dilemmas
and challenges of practitioners and activists; research and practise that are not
afraid of being ‘counter’, committed and personal; research and practise
grounded in an equilibrium of structure and agency, that tell the stories of men
and women, youth and adults who live in poverty as tales of pain on the one
hand and of struggle and power, on the other, as tales of structure – limiting
and damaging – on the one hand, and of subjectivity and agency – rich and
human – on the other (for the position of ‘both-and’ in social work feminist
practice as opposed to the use of dichotomies, see Sands and Nuccio, 1992).
This is the critical poverty agenda that social work needs.
Note
1 At the early 90th, when I first came to know the Fourth World Movement, there
was not a tradition of social change or human rights movements that dealt specifi-
cally with people in poverty in Israel. Since the end of that decade this situation
has been changed.
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Michal Krumer-Nevo is the director of the Israeli Center for Qualitative
Research of People and Societies, and senior lecturer at the Spitzer Depart-
ment of Social Work. Her research interests focus on people and communities
in poverty and marginalization, gender, and emancipatory methodologies such
as participatory and action research. She has published the first book in Hebrew
on life stories of women in poverty. Address: Spitzer Department of Social
Work, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B 653, Beersheva, Israel. [email:
kmichal@bgu.ac.il]
320 ■ Qualitative Social Work 8(3)
