Читать книгу Anti-Oppressive Social Work Practice - Prospera Tedam - Страница 77

Think about a situation or circumstance which left you feeling powerless.

 How did that make you feel?

 What did you do about it?

Discuss this with a colleague or reflect on your own.

We will now turn our attention to a practical tool to assist you in identifying how close you are to the dominant source of power.

The Power Flower was first introduced by Arnold and colleagues in 1991 and is presented as a daisy flower divided into 16 segments with each segment representing a category of our social identity. There are many different ways to use this activity, and the process described here is one that I have found to be effective. The flower has three layers. At the centre of the flower, write your name. The innermost layers show broad identity categories such as race, religion, sexuality and gender. The petals in the middle should contain your personal identities – for example, on the race petal, I would write ‘Black’. Finally, the outermost petals represent social identities, which in our view experience privilege and power. Again, using the petal which represents race, I would write ‘White’. We can already see that in my community, the dominant race is White and I am Black, placing me in the minority position in relation to race. The rationale behind this exercise is to enable you to visualise how close or distant you are from the dominant identities in our communities.

Figure 3.1 The Power Flower

Source: The Power Flower from Arnold et al., 1991. Used with permission of the publisher.