What are the structures of your society related to power, inequality, and marginalization? On what basis are these structures rationalized by members of society? What social behaviors, values, or assumptions hold such structures in place? What is your location in relation to each of these structures?
In this assignment, address your understanding of how your values and beliefs reflect social location, power and privilege, and experiences of social inclusion/exclusion. Without writing a detailed autobiography, think about how do you know who you are? How do the key messages about class, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation get delivered? As part of your paper:
Reflect upon the degree to which issues such as class, gender, race, and ethnicity, or sexual orientation were openly discussed in your home.
Reflect upon what this level of discussion might signify and how it impacted your development of a sense of self. It may also be helpful to think about whether there was a particular moment in which these issues became more visible (i.e., openly discussed) within your family.
Describe any contradicting parts of your self-assessment based on the information above, and your way of dealing with them.
Reflect upon the ways the aspects of yourself (described above) influence, affect, and (in particular) bias your perspectives toward people who are different from you.
Describe ways you may monitor your actions toward others to ensure that bias does not negatively affect your clients.
Please note that this paper will not be posted on the discussion board.
Students have found it helpful to address the following questions, but you do not have to incorporate all nor even most of them. Use 2 to 3 from each category as focus points for your paper and organize your writing under headings e. g. Introduction, Questions about “the world”, Questions about “your world” and so on.
Questions about “the world”
What are the structures of your society related to power, inequality, and marginalization? On what basis are these structures rationalized by members of society? What social behaviors, values, or assumptions hold such structures in place?
What is your location in relation to each of these structures? What do you know about how people in your location are supposed to act with regard to others in the same location (location in relation to the social categories class, race, power, gender or other) toward those in other social groups?
Who benefits from such structural arrangements and who loses? How do you benefit or lose?
In what ways do your assumptions and activities contribute to the maintenance or transformation of such social structures?
What have you discovered (what can you discover) about the extended structural consequences of your social actions and that of others?
Questions about “your world”
What do you believe about yourself, your place in the world and about the place of people like or different from you?
What assumptions do you make and what values do you hold about your social world and its structures, including structures of inclusion and exclusion?
What is your understanding about how to act in relation to someone who belongs to a different class, race, status and so forth? And from what sources have you learned these social lessons?
Which of these structural arrangements have you internalized? How do you rationalize them? How do your actions reflect or repudiate these beliefs and values?
Questions about the ways you understand “your world” and “the world”
In what ways are your values, beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, and self-understandings reflections of economic, social, educational, or other systems?
To what extent do you accept or accept uncritically the values, beliefs, assumptions, and prescriptions you have received as a result of your socialization into particular communities?
To what extent do you accept the structures of your society as unproblematic, especially structures related to power and privilege? To what extent are you able or willing to raise questions about them?
Are there inconsistencies or distortions between your received beliefs/assumptions and the concrete conditions of individual and group life? How do you account for these contradictions?
In what ways are your perspectives, beliefs, values, and assumptions related to your self-interest and perceived needs?
Are there contradictions between your avowed intentions or values and the structural outcomes of your activities?
Tie in relevant course materials to strengthen the paper. For example, were there readings that helped you deepen your reflection and understanding of these issues? Do not summarize course material, rather use it to help you move beyond a descriptive account of yourself to a more critical analysis of how you know who you are.
