The Implications of Disability Protests for Social Work Practice
Francis K. O. Yuen, Carol B. Cohen, Kristine Tower in Disability and Social Work Education, 2013
What is it that disability activists have been protesting about since 1970? What is the content of their collective consciousness? Most basically, it has been based upon a demand that a new model of disability be accepted by society. (See Kleinfield, 1977; Meyerson, 1988; Stroman, 1982; Deegan, 1981; Barnartt, 1986; Barnartt and Christiansen, 1985; Christiansen and Barnartt, 1987; Gleidman and Roth, 1980; Hahn, 1985a, 1985b.) These emphasized that lower incomes, economic discrimination, and political powerlessness characterize people with impairments in the same way that they characterize members of other minority groups. What was demanded was what sociologists call a frame extension (Snow, 1982; Snow et al., 1986). This involves the removal of three aspects of the cultural lens through which people with impairments have traditionally been viewed–disability as sickness, disability as deviance, and disability as an individual problem–and the application of frame of civil rights (Altman and Barnartt, 1993). In the oft-quoted title of Scotch’s (1984) book, advocates wanted a change “From Good Will to Civil Rights.” If civil rights were to be given to blacks, women, and others, people with impairments wanted those rights to be given to them, also.4
Collective Social Mobility and Social Structure
Noel Parry, José Parry in The Rise of the Medical Profession, 2018
Social and economic threats are an important stimulus to the development of occupational associations. These tend to enhance the articulation of the collective consciousness which the group has of itself. An occupational association typically proposes a strategy and tactics designed to defend the group from such threats or to secure for it an improved position. It should be noted that although several strategies are possible only some, for example professionalism, tie up with the sufficient condition for upward collective social mobility, viz. the desire on the part of particular groups to assimilate with other groups regarded as higher in the class/status structure than they are themselves. Upward collective social mobility therefore requires a group to breach any barriers erected by those above it and at the same time construct defensible barriers against those aspiring to move up from below.
Ethics and global health
Andrew D. Pinto, Ross E.G. Upshur in An Introduction to Global Health Ethics, 2013
A second powerful value to bring to global health work is solidarity, which we posit begins within the practice of humility, reflexivity and introspection – situating oneself in the world (see Chapter 3). It is intimately related to the operationalization of social justice. Solidarity is a sociological term first brought into academic usage in 1893 by Durkheim, who distinguished mechanical solidarity from organic solidarity. Mechanical solidarity existed when people related to one another based on similarities, such as their common religion, tribe or ethnicity. This similar identity produced a ‘collective consciousness’ and people were motivated to work together towards a common goal: the benefit of the group. In more modern societies, people relate to one another based on the division of labor, and hence their differences. Organic solidarity is developed through mutual interdependence and a reliance on others, with an emphasis on the individual (Durkheim 1984).
Getting out of the seclusion trap? Work as meaningful occupation for the subjective well-being of asylum seekers in South Tyrol, Italy
Published in Journal of Occupational Science, 2018
Claudia Lintner, Susanne Elsen
From a sociological perspective, Durkheim (1984), as one of the first sociologists, discussed the concept of social integration. In doing so, he argued that societal norms, beliefs and values generate a collective consciousness, which in turn binds individuals together and creates social integration. Furthermore, as Durkheim (1988) showed in his classical study of suicide, social integration is an essential element in promoting the subjective well-being of individuals. In other words, family bonds, social relationships and religious practices, as well as integrating institutions, can be seen as fundamental sources for generating social solidarity, binding individuals into a society and offering them a sense of belonging and meaning (Gupta, 2012; Stroebe, Stroebe, Abakoumkin, & Schut, 1995). Accordingly, social solidarity provides individuals with social capital (Coleman, 1988), which in turn offers them resources that can be used to realize their interests. In the context of migration, people often have less access to social capital resources, in particular because of social and linguistic isolation (Kao & Taggart Rutherford, 2007). In addition, asylum seekers often find themselves in socially and spatially isolated situations that prevent them from developing integrative strategies (Essed & Wesenbeek, 2004).
The Uncanny Swipe Drive: The Return of a Racist Mode of Algorithmic Thought on Dating Apps
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2021
Transforming this collective consciousness will not be easy. Indeed, Benjamin (2019) finds that Black people are often disenfranchised by the very tech fixes devised to benefit them. But she warns we should not see this as a concerted effort by racist programmers to keep Black people down. In fact, the effort to call out individual racism often distracts us from the slow death perpetuated by “subtler and even alluring forms of coded inequality” that go on under the radar (Benjamin, 2019, p. 24). A beauty contest conducted by Beauty AI illustrates this point. Programmed to determine beauty through prelabeled images, it ultimately deemed White people to be the most beautiful because it learned from images labeled by people with racial biases. Thus, we should strive to make sure the data that machines learn from are unbiased. If they were, artificial intelligence (AI) could help us “subvert the status quo by exposing and authenticating the existence of systemic inequality” and, ultimately, allow us to “come to grips with our deeply held cultural and institutionalized biases” (2019, p. 65).
Notes on growing love: Cherríe Moraga’s “If,” a world-making incantation conjuring collective consciousness through Chicana lesbian po(i)esis
Published in Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2023
Because colonial capitalism structures and depends on hyper-individualism to enable social division, we are made to forget how much we need each other. The epistemic attack on our collective consciousness is too a kind of ontological violence. We don’t register the magnitude of its attack until dire times call up dead whales and fish-kills on seashores and lakesides. It takes pandemics and the gravity of loss so deep to stun us into re-membering. Reading Chicana Lesbians in this context reminds me of the emotional valence of the social ostracization endured by Chicana lesbians. Its metaphysical residue is legible on the page. Like witchcraft, the text illuminates how we can turn the wisdom of surviving countless aftershocks from heteropatriarchal attack and rejection into magic spells and healing potions. “If” is decolonial medicine in this regard. Reading “If” in pandemic times calls my spirit back from the susto sustained by la pandemia’s theft of colored lives this colonial world depends on forgetting.28 “If” reorients us so tenderly toward each other. There are pedagogical instructions in this poem capable of undoing colonialism through the collective sense-abilities of Chicana lesbian affective relations serving up kryptonite to colonial structures of violence. In a socio-political context marked by genocidal death, and generations of and continual attacks on the heart, especially the queer corazón, the tenderness and care expressed in the poem re-roots a heart-centered Chicana lesbian subjectivity capable of re-invigorating political solidarities, joint struggles, and collective consciousness, and building worlds anew.
Related Knowledge Centers
- Anomie
- Collective Identity
- Collective Memory
- Groupthink
- Meme
- Herd Behavior
- Knowledge
- Mind
- Abilene Paradox
- Collective Effervescence