Understanding Adam’s Decolonial and Social Justice Framework in Field Education

Hi, my name is Tina Odu.

My name is Eleanor Hogan. We're social work apprentices pursuing bachelors in social work in the United Kingdom. Welcome to the Decolonised and social work Field Education podcast.

Through this podcast, we invite you to think about how we can decolonise social work, field education. We've heard about social justice from the very start of our social work.

Training. In fact, before we even started our training, we were expected to know the concept of social justice and human rights and reflect this in our application and interviews.

While we learned a lot about social justice in our syllabus, we're encouraged to think about the about anti discriminatory and anti oppressive practice and everything we do, how we write, case notes, how we introduce ourselves to the people we work.

With and how societal structures and systems can further oppress and marginalise people, even through technology, for example?

Yes, but amongst all one framework that stayed with me, especially in relation to social justice, is the Adam’s framework, which covers a justice as process, justice as content and justice as pedagogy.

This framework also covers is covered in our recent scoping review, which we have read and.

It's a fantastic, wholesome approach towards understanding justice as a whole, which brings us to our today's conversation with our host Dr. Michael Wallengren Lynch and our guest.

Any guesses? Dr. Taskeen Adam herself. Let's hear about her framework and social justice and much more in today's episode, which is understanding Adam’s Decolonial and Social justice framework in Field education.

My name is Michael Wallengren Lynch and I'm a senior lecturer in Social work at Malmo University, Sweden. Originally from Ireland, I've been living in Sweden since 2009 when my research interests focused on decolonial ideas and their relevance to social work in the Nordic countries.

I first encountered the work of today's guests while collaborating with the team behind this podcast series. Her framework on justice as process justice as content and justice as a warm welcome to Taskeen Adams. Taskeen perhaps you'd like to start by telling us a little bit about yourself.

Hi, Michael. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. So yeah,a bit about myself. I'm actually an engineer by training, but I delved into the world of development studies and education and then moved on to look more in technology and decoloniality and social justice trying to understand.

That looking at the impacts of technology on education, the good, the bad, the ugly, we'll delve into it more through the podcast, so I won't say too much upfront right now.

OK, OK. Very teasing us with the good about the ugly. We'll hope you address all those three as we go along.

I came across a very interesting citation from a historian from the US called Melvin Kranzberg in the 80s, where he proposed that these six laws to technology and the first law he was fascinated by the ideas. Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. Where what would you think about that? Would you agree with us? Is that why we're maybe talking about decolonialism and technologies?

Thinking about AI, So what do?

You think about that statement.

Yeah, I think that's a really good way to start off and a lot of people look at technology as something that's neutral, but there's a specific quote by McLuhan I think and it's called the medium is the.

Message.

And it talks more about like how when technology is brought in, it's not just a tool, but it actually shapes and changes society.

Just when the printing press came in and printed media, it changed how we understood, it changed society from something that was predominantly oral to something written at the same time, TV things that how we find information, how we learn. It's all shaped so pedagogies, epistemologies, ontologies. All are shaped.

By this technology, even AI has almost taken us as a step change and shift in in how we think and how we do.

Things. So yeah, I definitely don't think it's neutral. I think that often people would look look to technology as ohh. It's like a hammer. You can use it to do something good or you can use it to harm someone. But I actually heard in in another podcast recently someone comparing AI to a fire and a fire can be used to warm.

someone else. Warm, warm us up, but it can also create a wildfire and spread so it can be the danger can be disproportional to the benefit in some cases.

We know there's many definitions, understanding of what decolonialism means. We'll be interested to hear a.

Bit.

About how you approach them, what you've learned from it, how you maybe if you're applying it to the world of AI, how we are to maybe critically reflect on how AI can be both good, bad and ugly.

Maybe say a little more.

About so these kind of key terms and ideas.

Thanks for that. I love starting off with definitions because they help make a whole conversation much clearer. So I think.

We talk about decolonisation, but like we can first start with colonisation, right? And most often people look to colonisation as understanding it as the political and economic relation where one nation is controlling and.

Exerting power and economic, political and economic power over another nation and then the idea of decolonisation would be when.

Country of this nation is emancipated, and so that's what we saw in the formal definition in the mid 20th century. Many colonies were emancipated politically, and I would say somewhat economically, although that's under contestation. But here I think probably what the terms that I like to use to shift from colonisation and decolonisation.

is Coloniality and decoloniality because colonisation can often be confused with an end goal. Now we have we have decolonised. We have achieved this whereas coloniality and decoloniality would emphasise more the process as something that's ongoing. So there's never really an endpoint so.

I guess just to unpack coloniality and decoloniality, coloniality then like it refers to these like long standing patterns of power as a result of colonialism, so it would impact how we think, how we act, our culture, what we understand as knowledge production, if we are to draw on Latin American scholars.

They look at the coloniality of knowledge, the coloniality of being, and the coloniality of power.

And so when then when we look at decoloniality, we look at this as this process of removing these colonial legacies and that to use a definition of Maldonado, Torrens, he says the dismantling of relations of power and conceptions of knowledge that have forementioned formented the reproduction of, like, racial, gender. Geopolitical hierarchies and that's how you know they've formed in this kind of this new modern colonial world.

And then taking the next step you asked about AI as well. So a lot of my research takes ground work from these Latin American and African scholars on decoloniality and looks at it in the digital space. And so I use this term digital neocolonialism, and I defined it in my research as like the use of information.

Technology, or the Internet and now even AI as part of all of this, the use of this by hegemonic power.

To have a means of indirect control over, it could be a marginal group or a country, and then in this kind of model it's no longer one country controlling another country, but it could be a corporate or international institution that can exert this power, whether through data colonialism, cyber colonialism.

It's also termed techno capitalism in some cases.

Based on that, the series of arguments, would you?

Agree or would?

You say that coloniality, so is an ongoing process in this modern world as.

You refer to.

is AI an extension of Coloniality?

Or is it something else?

So coloniality, I definitely do think is something that is ongoing because we've shifted our powers, right? It might not just be about land anymore, right? But it could be about data. It's still, it's still control and there's still economic power being exerted by. I would not say countries anymore say some groups because we've moved into more of a techno capitalist.

Space to bring in more current affairs we see like the reduction of like foreign aid was also critiqued as this indirect control and now in the latest changes in.

With US aid and UK aid, we see a reduction maybe in one country’s indirect control in in another, but an increase in techno capitalism where different for-profit companies or big tech are increasingly exerting their power. And sometimes it comes with good and bad. And then I said the ugly as well.

So yeah, for good and bad, there's that shift from, I would say, countries to institutes or corporations.

And yeah, and that is definitely empowered by the tech backing.

Particularly in education, where it can come across as like the savior mentality of techno determinism, where technology is going to come in and solve the problems that couldn't be solved before.

Yeah, the new religion, the modern religions. So I guess if we're thinking now this is you, what you've presented is maybe a mix of good, bad and the ugly And if we're saying.

Decolonialism or decoloniality is a very widely used and I mean it's been more popular in all the social workspace. What can that offer at this type of world that you describe being this techno capitalist worlds where they say capitalism is the driving force? What can decoloniality actually practically offer in this? If we're thinking about education, social work?

Yeah. So maybe I can take you through my.

Framework to understand.

A bit more how I unpack decoloniality and the understanding of it, maybe in relation to social justice.

So I draw on like the decoloniall frameworks and social justice frameworks, so decolonial frameworks from more the global South that focus on, like dismantling the sources that have caused injustices and then social justice frameworks that were more developed in the global North that that have taken either.

Relative or transformative steps towards addressing injustices. And so in, in my framework, I look at cultural epistemic injustices. So this relates to dominant concepts of knowledge that could exclude different histories of values, narratives, and world views. Then I look at material injustice.

Which is normally when people talk about justice, they normally first jump to this looking at access and use issues looking at resource infrastructure, socioeconomic injustices. And then we look at the political and geopolitical injustices. So this, like Maldonado Torres emphasised, could be the how.

The power dynamics basically that underlie different race, class, sexual, gender, geographic or spiritual hierarchies, so that those are the lenses of analysis that I use to tackle the space. And I think what's really useful is once you have the words to describe.

The injustice. It becomes so much easier to then pinpoint these.

I think that's what we took from your. That's another paper. That's where you spoke about justice as process, content and pedagogy you maybe, can you say something about how those relate to this, what you just spoke about about the cultural, I guess the symbologies can we are they is that is that is that a development of your thoughts or is it is it in?

Another word or how they live together.

Yeah, that that's a good question. I just just taking a step back first, when I was trying to understand and probably just talking through this as the journey, like looking at decoloniality and social justice, there were many like different and complex and competing understandings of these words. And what I found was like in developing that.

Framework is that it was easier to just talk about the injustice. It's easier to hone in clearly on what the problem is because different people apply different solutions which.

Can be.

It can sometimes even cause further injustices. In one of my papers, I look at decoloniality versus social justice, and I look at 3 processes which can help us to strive for justice right. And with this is within the education or online education space, there's justice as content, justice as process, and justice as pedagogy.

So in my research I was working with MOOC massive Open online course designers and trying to understand how they understood decoloniality and social justice and how they tried, if at all, to incorporate it into their courses with that context in mind, justice as content.

Was where we looked at decolonising. What is taught right? So this could be in the materials and the text and the discussions and the.

assessments or examples of feedback and it aimed to understand and bring about different perspectives. For example, if you're working within a local community, working with their context and indigenous knowledges, or or things that are rooted within that space, so that was justice as content, then justice as process.

Yeah, it was decolonising the process or how something is designed, how a course curriculum is designed, how assessment happens, how content is formed and here it's all about relational processes. So for example, including students in this process, Co creating with students, thinking of different forms of assessment.

Then the third one was justice as pedagogy, and here we're looking at how we can encourage students to.

critically Engage or reflect, or even challenge what is being taught. So challenge. The teacher, have that really critical discussion and yeah, it's about being able to bring that critical reflexivity into the space. Both the learner and the teacher understand their power differences and how that could impact how they view the world and how they approach.

The course that they're taking.

Yeah, that's a great point, especially about the importance of it also being reflective journey.

For the teacher.

That's there and that also requires maybe deconstruction of roles or processions of roles in in education or is in the practice future students setting when students are in placement or even in in an education setting. What I'm curious about before we want more kind of practical questions about you.

Positions you said versus decolonialism versus social justice and I'm wondering is there?

Some kind of. Is there a risk about using these terms interchangeably? Do we feel sometimes we're overuse, we diluted certain meanings like as social workers may be grappling existentially with the ideas of social justice and how we really delivers on that, and some people would say we haven't at all. And so how is there a danger of these terms being overused?

Yeah, yeah, I definitely do. So I think both terms can have many meanings, and if used incorrectly or just thrown around or used in a whitewashed way, they can actually reinforce.

Injustices, I guess, to maybe just to give you a little bit of a deep dive into my thinking. When I research social justice frame.

Works like I mentioned. Many of them. Actually, all of them. The term comes from the global north, right and from Canton Mills over over time to more recent works of Nussbaum and Sandal, all of them have each has their own understanding of that and many like I mentioned start off with.

Redistributive justices. Right? And that's about reallocation of resources. But more recent frameworks bring in recognitive justices, which is more about respecting culture and difference and representational justices, which is about equitable representation.

And so social justice itself has had a history, first focusing on justice within your nation versus more recent understandings of global justice frameworks. So there's a shift, and if you look, I think again past 2015, after decolonial movement started, social justice even took a decolonial turn and started to look more.

At the sources of systematic oppression, rather than the consequences.

of systematic oppression, which is first what social justice addressed the consequences now. Similarly, decolonial movements can also risk reinforcing injustices if they've not been dealt with appropriately. As I think I I love to use Jonathan Johnson's work here as he highlight some of this in like the African context, for example.

One interpretation of decolonisation might be africanisation, where you take the curriculum and you replace everything that's European with something that's local and.

Indigenous. But here we like risk the the we run the risk of nativism or localization being Co opted for political or national agendas. And it also doesn't really acknowledge hybrid identities that are now formed between us. Maybe natures we we evolve over time and we can't be dated to something that was.

From the 1900s or even before.

That so we have all.

As a as a nation as well. Another example might be afrocentrism, where it's OK, we're not going to reject everything European, but we're going to recenter things. But this even has its problems, because it's it might not be about taking the best, acknowledging that even local or indigenous knowledges are not infallible, right.

So they might also they also need to be open to critical engagement and discussion.

Just as a third example, Johnson also talks about knowledge as entanglement, and here it's a different view. So it's understanding that knowledge.

Evolves over time, and it's inseparable from regions because knowledge is evolving and it's how what we know and how we know. It's through interaction with different spaces and cultures and that that help us.

Transform and so the this sounds. It sounds like the answer, but then it also stands the risk of like knowledge is written by the victor and those marginalised knowledges don't get carried in this process. So nothing is perfect. And yeah, we also have we have to keep on being critical even when we think we're real we achieving some sort of justice.

An answer and there's so much in that for sure, and I love that idea about entangled knowledge and this kind of almost whole post humanist idea. And I guess then it's the question how do how does something like social work in practice and in teaching ensure that these marginalised voices are?

Represented, heard, engaged with in this. I guess your focus on these online spaces, but how do we navigate this enormous complexity?

I think one aspect that I would probably emphasise is the importance of within the social work, education, building, the capacity to deal with difference, and this is something that we see in our current state right now is an increase in polarised views and perspectives like the world is just somehow becoming so.

Polarized. And I do think that.

technology and algorithms are feeding that right based on it's not the only source for sure, but a very big source is you are shaped by what you see and what you hear. And as these algorithms try to feed you what you want to hear, it creates these polarisations of perspectives and so as social workers, we need to encourage engaging and supporting.

People who might have different ideas but also having people who are being supported also feeling open to sharing their different ideologies or perspectives or problems. In your paper you talk about like land conflicts and how that is such a difficult concept.

but it like the sort of idea of like Western ideologies seeping into everything. It might not be super political, maybe just to give you a personal anecdote. When I was in university, I attended university counselling as a Muslim woman, and I wasn't married yet. And I was. I was expressing this to the.

Counselor, right. Trying to understand, like, oh, I'm going for a PhD.

but I am not married yet and as I was saying this, as this, these western ideologies or norm weighing down on me, that I'm not feminists, why? Why do I care so much for my cultural background? This is not normal, and it was just like this conflicting feeling that my counsellor is going to be judging me because.

The ideal norm is to be the empowered woman that doesn't need to get married, or so one of these clashes are to ramble. But all of these clashes you can to be a good counsellor means to.

Be able to make a space for someone to not feel judged or misunderstood in those spaces. This is your space you know best how to address those challenges, but I think.

Dealing with difference it is it has always been a topic in social, justice in social work, but I feel like these differences are now way more polarised.

Just to jump, you also asked about the digital space.

And like my response there just said.

I would encourage as much as possible to keep things as in person as possible, and I say this because like education is is something that like, it really does need mentorship and empathy and care and interest and use of body language and modeling, role models, physical interaction, kinesthetics these are all like.

Hidden parts of education that we don't quite realize how are really important to the teaching and learning process.

Sure, it's great that you also lifted the word empowerment because it kind of moves on to my last question.

And I'm wondering about how you.

Do you see in harm and as something which is still has resonance and meaning? You know in it to support people in this highly techno capitalistic world driven by algorithms and AI and that happens and so forth. Do you feel there's this role? Is there still?

So this kind of the relational relationality and based on their digital empowerment.

Yes, So I'm not completely pessimistic. There's definitely benefits to many benefits to using tech or ed-tech and AI in in ways that are empowering. A term I learned recently was like the understanding of like ‘learnification’, as learning shifts online, there's a bigger focus on datafication.

of learning. So understanding how we can view learning as bite sized chunks to then track and progress learning so this like learnification and.

We so focus on the process that we might lose sight of the content and the purpose and the relationships involved in education. We always have to come back to the purpose of education, how it can inculcate goodness and justice in man, as in as an individual and as a member of society. And that links so much to social work, right? Education is a social act, right? And we talk.

Talk about social work. Yeah, like it's so embedded in communities. And so you can't just be replaced by machines.

So I think my the current bandwagon that I'm on is making sure that people understand that education is not just an intellectual pursuit, it's something that includes the heart and the soul. And if we reduce it to just an intellectual pursuit, then we're really doing a huge disservice to generations to come.

Wonderful, wonderful final words. I think there and they really just capitulates and we really highlights the good, bad and ugly and it really invites us to kind of really.

Connect what you're saying to, or at least the people who are listening to social work students, who are listening to the podcast. How this makes sense for them and their in their going to social work experience. So I really would like to thank you for participating. And Taskeen it was great to listen and to get to understand a little more of of your thoughts and where all this is going.. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

That was an intriguing conversation about social justice. I love frameworks as I find them really useful in breaking down complex subjects, and we have had an endless list of frameworks in our social work studies, haven't we, Eleanor?

Absolutely. I really like that, Adam said. So education is a social act. Many people with low social and economic statuses are encouraged to go into work rather than higher education, and I think that making higher education a reachable goal for more people can help fight these social injustices and promote social change.

I agree, colonialism and the impact is still very much an ongoing process in today's world.

I agree socioeconomical injustices. I felt large with the people that I work with on placement, which is in a small seaside town in a deprived area. As social workers, we are encouraged to promote social change and the well-being of people we work with.Uusing frameworks like this can help support that.

Absolutely. I feel really emboldened that I can approach the subject of social justice and coloniality or colonialism using Adam's framework, which kind of feels like a foolproof approach in my opinion.

As social workers, we will always be learning, even when we had finished our training, we invite you to think critically wherever you are on your social work journey.

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