A visitor publish from Dr David Kenkel
A dictionary definition describes nostalgia as “A wistful or excessively sentimental craving for return to, or of, some previous interval or irrecoverable situation” (Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, 2024). Nostalgia will be vicious; it’s usually an important deal greater than the wistful yearnings for earlier remembered paradises.
….
As Hyslop (2022, and 2022) reminds us, social work just isn’t – and by no means has been – a politically impartial career. Social Work has at all times had an activist strand that stands in opposition to oppression, and this must be celebrated. We now have additionally been responsible as a career of appalling atrocities in opposition to indigenous peoples, and others who didn’t match the tasteless descriptions of how households ought to perform.
It solely takes little scratching on the floor of historical past to recollect the uplift of Māori youngsters within the a number of hundreds, the contempt and shaming of unwed moms and the enforced categorization of non-cisgender peoples as legal and sick. Social Work was there each step of the best way and appeared completely prepared to implement the rosy phantasm of ‘regular’ society promoted by our political masters.
Nasty Nostalgias:
In my expertise of Fb and different media, sometimes a meme arrives lamenting the lack of the 1960/70s days when Aotearoa’s worst legal issues had been milk-bar cowboys, the place all youngsters grew up in joyful (English talking) properties with married female and male (heterosexual) dad and mom – and had been free to roam the streets and play exterior with out the distraction of digital units.
Apparently in these days there was no racism in New Zealand. Homosexuality was a (nasty) phrase within the dictionary, seashores and rivers had been superb locations of enjoyable and fishing for all, and our beauteous ‘godzone’ egalitarian paradise was an instance to the world. Air pollution meant damaged glass on the seashore (shock horror). This was additionally a time the place adventurous younger Kiwis on their OE’s might enterprise to Israel and have a good time working in a kibbutz and having fun with the pleasures of this new nation of the free and courageous.
Nicely, sorry:
This was and is a crap story. In actuality, these had been instances of profound cultural, linguistic and geographical oppression of Māori. It was hell on earth in the event you didn’t match the hetero-normative story. Youngster abuse inside households was swept underneath the carpet (if acknowledged in any respect). And the brutality of home violence was micro-minimised because the occasional ‘home’ (often attributable to a lady ‘nagging’ an excessive amount of).
The world order was seen as a settled factor with America the benevolent keepers of the peace. Nations like Israel had been understood as heroic in carving out a brand new nation state on (apparently) empty land. Air pollution was a matter of getting folks to do higher with their garbage and the contribution of growth-driven international overuse of fossil fuels was not even a faint cloud on future horizons.
About nostalgia and its political utilization:
All nostalgia operates as a tool to shadow and conceal inconvenient historic truths and present lived realities. Nostalgia labels / narrates as ‘nonsense’ or ‘whining’, the tales of these which are and had been oppressed and different dissenting opinions that don’t slot neatly into the joyful historic story.
Usually, harping again to the great outdated days works finest for many who had been finest served by the imposed truths of these days. In New Zealand’s occasion, middle-class Pakeha who’ve executed properly within the intervening years between the late Nineteen Seventies and right this moment.
If nostalgia was merely a matter of the outdated remembering nice instances, then it will not be problematic. The place it turns into problematic is when nostalgia turns into a device for the contempoary imposition of a historic story that was by no means true. Nostalgia, in our present epoch can grow to be a tool for the implementation of the cruelest of insurance policies.
We’re seeing this within the emboldened voices inside Aotearoa’s new authorities, testing its oats with statements equivalent to not being swayed by ‘local weather disaster hysteria’, and a dedication to reversing using Te Reo in public / departmental discourse. Predictably we’ll hear extra such rhetoric and it’s prone to be enforced.
Sadly:
The local weather disaster is deserving of an activist ‘hysteria’ with respected scientific our bodies suggesting we’re up a number of shit-creeks within the subsequent 15 years, each globally and in New Zealand (Kenkel, 2023). As Weaver (2002) additionally makes clear, language sits on the coronary heart of indigenous cultures sustaining and regaining their integrity and mana. The present Authorities’s minimalizing of the realities of local weather change and the central position of Te Reo in a future Aotearoa are a vicious instance of a nostalgic imposition of ‘one language for all’ and ‘she’ll be proper’.
These concepts might swimsuit the privileged and complacent however they gas-light and oppress the present and historic expertise of many. If Neale (2019) is to be believed, nation states grow to be extra vicious within the face of troubling instances (these are troubling instances). The intent of the state will grow to be (I think) extra sternly obvious in its instruction of how Social Work is to be carried out.
Silence on Palestine:
The nostalgic story of Israel as a society of courageous pioneers carving out a brand new nation is now being revealed as a fiction created at the price of the Palestinian folks presently struggling near-genocidal assault. What can be obvious is the affect and help of america of America and lots of different Western Nations in propping up this little doubt worthwhile nostalgic fiction. The absence of condemnation by Social Work’s Worldwide our bodies is a stark reminder that when push involves shove their loyalties are with a world capitalist established order, regardless of fairly phrases on paper about difficult oppression.
In Aotearoa I’ve puzzled if we made knowledgeable mistake 20 years in the past in accepting the creation of the SWRB as a authorities directed registration and policing physique? This physique has no mandate to critique and no mandate to shout ‘hell no’! I think if somebody senior from SWRB expressed public outrage about Palestine and the present assault on Te Reo they might be quietly shuffled apart and changed with a extra biddable candidate.
Hope:
Many people thought that the social struggles of current many years had uncovered this nostalgic narrative for the white-washing that it’s. Not so, it appears – it’s sport on once more for many who maintain to progressive visions of social improvement and financial justice. The place hope for Social Work as a very activist career might reside is in Fritz’s (1996) assertion that communities underneath risk discover solidarity and reference to one another. To maintain our integrity we, as particular person Social Staff and as a career, must be loudly a part of that solidarity as and after we can. We should refuse to collude with the enforcement of a harmful and oppressive nostalgia.
Picture credit score: tgidenver
References
Fritz, C. (1996). Disasters and psychological well being: Therapeutic ideas drawn from catastrophe research. Historic and comparative catastrophe collection #10. College of Delaware Catastrophe Analysis Centre.
Hyslop, I. (2022). A Political Historical past of Youngster Safety – Classes for Reform from Aotearoa New Zealand. Bristol: Bristol College Press.
Kenkel, D, J. (2023). Putting Folks in Time. Doctoral Dissertation. Universitat Blanquerna Ramon-Hull. Barcelona.
Neale, J. (2019). Social collapse and local weather breakdown. Ecologist: The Journal for The PostIndustrial Age. https://theecologist.org/2019/may/08/social–collapse–and–climatebreakdown
“Nostalgia.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, 2024. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nostalgia.
Weaver, H, N. (Ed). (2022). The Routledge Worldwide Handbook of Indigenous Resilience. ISBN 9780367499853
