Part 3 Summary of Findings, Conclusions and
1.8 Overview of Contents
The remainder of Part 1 (Chapters 2 to 5) of this thesis serves to contextualise the study and assist in drawing its empirical findings, contained in Part 2 of this thesis, to the relevant ethical conclusions. In Chapter 2, I review the literature pertaining to cross-border migration and South Africa’s changing regimes of migration governance. I begin with the implications of globalisation for nation states as political entities and for traditional notions of state boundaries and citizenship. This is followed by a discussion of the historic development of sub-Saharan Africa’s migratory systems, including South Africa’s changing roles and functions within these systems. Thereafter, I analyse the phenomenon of xenophobia, which I consider to be one of the key challenges facing cross-border migrants in contemporary South Africa. I conclude that within the context of complex global and historical processes which at once cause social injustices and limit states’ capacities to respond to them, practitioners in the field of cross-border migration cannot but receive contradictory and unattainable mandates and for these reasons, can expect to face considerable ethical challenges in their work.
Chapter 3 reviews the literature pertaining to the ethics of social work with cross-border migrants. I begin by locating social work with cross-border migrants within the larger field of international social work, before engaging with the kinds of tasks, roles and challenges that appear to be specific to the field. I interrogate how the question of social justice is framed in the reviewed literature, which, I find, successfully explicates the ways in which social workers fall short of meeting the profession’s aspirations of countering social injustice and promoting social justice. Because many texts take recourse to social work’s global definition and statement of ethical principles to make their points, I consider these two documents thereafter. However, in spite of being an important reference point for debate, the global definition, statement of principles, and the debates they inform do not seem to provide sufficient guidance for practitioners wishing to promote social justice in complex economic, political, social, cultural, and ideological terrains. I conclude that if the aim is to support practitioners in responding justly to service users under difficult conditions – as is the case in the field of social work with cross-border migrants – ethical discourse needs to attend carefully to the depth of practitioner’s entanglement in broader structures, processes and dynamics of social injustice.
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I consider this issue of entanglement in Chapter 4, which contains the study’s paradigmatic considerations. I begin with a discussion of how structural processes of injustice (Young 1990, 2007, 2011) can affect the daily practices of social workers and other practitioners of care.
Thereafter, I consider how a political ethics of care (Tronto 1993, 2011, 2013, 2014; Robinson 2010) might contribute to performing the leap from a critical analysis to facilitating ethical responses in particular situations of injustice. Because these approaches require practitioners to critically reflect on their own implication in regimes of injustice, I engage with two sets of concerns articulated in this regard, namely, that such focus on the ‘self’ risks narcissistic pre- occupation (Clifford 2014) and renders practitioners vulnerable to manipulation in the interest of unjust institutional regimes (Zembylas 2014). In response, I explore the role of emotions (Hugman 2005), attention to affective dissonance (Hemmings 2012), and critical emotional reflexivity (Zembylas 2014) in countering both types of risk and in promoting social justice. Chapter 5 concludes Part 1 with a justification of my methodological choices and a discussion of the research process, including among other things, the study’s ethnographic/auto-ethnographic design; my use of a reflexive diary, life story and depth individual interviews as data collection tools; and my use of critical discourse analysis and constructivist grounded theory for the data analysis.
Part 2 (Chapters 6 to 10) of the thesis consists of five publications, which contain the study’s empirical findings. Chapter 6: Dreams (Hölscher, Sathiparsad and Mujawamariya 2012) and Chapter 7: Subjectivities of Survival (Hölscher 2016) foreground the perspectives of cross- border migrants on the changing contexts of their lives. Dreams draws on the life stories of two refugee women, as well as diary entries on my encounters with them, to narrate their struggle for safety, survival and a dignified life in South Africa. Using Martha Nussbaum’s (2000, 2006) central capabilities as a benchmark to establish the extent to which social justice constituted a lived reality for the two women concerned, we find that at the intersection of cross-border migration and gender inequality, both women asserted their humanity and agency, displaying resilience and resistance to the social injustices in their lives. Yet, both were unable to enjoy many of those capabilities that Nussbaum (2000, 2006) considers essential to human flourishing and thus, to social justice. Subjectivities of Survival is based on my analysis of five life stories and explores the implications of Amartya Sen’s (1999, 2009) notion of agency for a conceptualisation of just social services and social work responses to
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displacement, migration and structural violence in urban South Africa. I consider the participants’ experiences from a point of uprooting, through their efforts to establish themselves in South Africa, to the obstacles encountered along the way and find a diminishing sense of agency, dignity and hope among all five of them. This I interpret as related to the differential ways in which structural violence affects South Africa’s urban poor and which, to be just, require equally differentiated responses.
Chapter 8: Encountering the Other (Hölscher and Bozalek 2012), and Chapter 9: Reflections on Misframing (Hölscher 2014) highlight the impact of broader structures, processes and dynamics on the perspectives, social positioning and unfolding relationships between cross- border migrants who were displaced during the May 2008 xenophobic violence and members of the church who provided them with emergency support and shelter. Both chapters draw on my diary records, four life stories and interviews with a practitioner of care but explore the topic from two different angles. In Encountering the Other, we explore how the relationships between members of the two groups unfolded over a period of 18 months, trying to better understand the processes through which they changed over time. In Reflections on Misframing, I begin by mapping the social injustices experienced by the cross- border migrants along the dimensions of misframing, misrepresentation, misrecognition and maldistribution (Fraser 2008a). I then interrogate how structural processes circumscribed and conditioned their encounters with members of the church. These two chapters demonstrate the extent to which structural forms of injustice pervaded the perspectives, social positioning and relationships of study participants – including my own. I find that in the absence of a shared political analysis and sufficiently critically-reflexive engagement with our entanglement in structural forms of injustice, the just practices that had emerged in the beginning of the study were ultimately unsustainable.
The theme of the entanglement within unjust contextual conditions is taken up once more in Chapter 10: Assuming Responsibility for Justice (Hölscher, Bozalek and Zembylas 2014). In this chapter, which ends Part 2 of the thesis, we apply Young’s (2006, 2007, 2011) ‘Social Connection Model of Responsibility for Justice’ with a view to better understanding the nature of relationships formed, services provided, and outcomes attained within the context of the refugee services organisation. Foregrounding the practitioners’ perspectives, we find that overall, the organisational context was unconducive for relationships and practices of
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solidarity and care. We conclude thus that a good starting point for developing just practices in the field of social work with cross-border migrants would be to attend to the disjunctions, hierarchies and dependencies that often provide the context for institutionalised welfare services.
Part 3 (Chapter 11) draws together the arguments contained Part 2 of the thesis, using the insights developed in Part 1. In this chapter, I summarise the study’s empirical findings in relation to Objectives 1, 2 and 3, followed by a discussion of their implications for social work’s conceptualisation of just practice, and of what the profession’s responsibility for justice might entail (Objective 4). The thesis concludes with a set of recommendations regarding the use of theory and ethical approaches, the formulation of aspirational statements, social work practice, teaching and learning, and research. Table 1.1 provides an overview of the five publications in relation to the research objectives, and Appendix 3.6 contains a list of contributors and their respective contributions to the publications.
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Chapter Publication Focus
Chapter 6:
Dreams
Social Work Researcher/Practitioner Accepted for publication: December 2011
Primary focus on –
Objective 1: The particular perspectives of cross-border migrants Implicit attention paid to –
Objective 2: Subject positions and relationships
Objective 3: Impact of structures, processes and dynamics Objective 4: Conceptualising just practice and social work’s responsibility for justice
Chapter 7:
Subjectivities of Survival
Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk Accepted for publication: November 2015
Primary focus on –
Objective 1: The particular perspectives of cross-border migrants
Implicit attention paid to –
Objective 2: Subject positions and relationships
Objective 3: Impact of structures, processes and dynamics Objective 4: Conceptualising just practice and social work’s responsibility for justice
Chapter 8:
Encountering the Other
British Journal of Social Work Accepted for publication: January 2012
Primary focus on –
Objective 2: The subject positions and relationships between cross-border migrants and members of the receiving community Implicit attention paid to –
Objective 1: Particular perspectives
Objective 3: Impact of structures, processes and dynamics Objective 4: Conceptualising just practice and social work’s responsibility for justice
Chapter 9:
Reflections on Misframing
Ethics and Social Welfare Accepted for publication: October 2012
Primary focus on –
Objective 3: The impact of structures, processes and dynamics on the perspectives, subject positions and relationships of cross- border migrants and members of the receiving community Implicit attention paid to –
Objective 1: Particular perspectives
Objective 2: Subject positions and relationships
Objective 4: Conceptualising just practice and social work’s responsibility for justice
Chapter 10:
Assuming Responsibility for Justice
Ethics and Social Welfare
Accepted for publication: December 2013
Primary perspective – Practitioners of care
Focus on the dialectics between – - Particular perspectives (Objective 1)
- Subject positions and relationships (Objective 2) - Structures, processes and dynamics (Objective 3)
- Conceptions of just practice and social work’s responsibility for justice (Objective 4)
Table 1.1: Overview of Articles Included in the Study
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Chapter 2
Cross-border Migration and South Africa’s Changing Regimes of Migration Governance
1The purpose of this chapter is to situate the study within its broader global, regional and national contexts, centring on issues of cross-border migration and migration governance in South Africa. In Section 2.1, I consider the implications of globalisation for nation states as political entities, including the impact on traditional notions of state boundaries and citizenship. Against this background, I provide, in Sections 2.2 and 2.3, a historic overview of sub-Saharan Africa’s migratory systems, which I discuss in relation to South Africa’s evolution from colony to apartheid state to a constitutional democracy, and the concomitant developments in the country’s regimes of migration governance. Thereafter, I reflect on xenophobic discourses, practices and violence, which I regard as one of the key challenges faced by cross-border migrants in contemporary South Africa.
The core argument of this chapter is that South Africa transitioned from successive autocratic regimes to a modern nation state and constitutional democracy under conditions of economic globalisation. These conditions are reflected both in the dynamics of sub-Saharan migratory systems and South Africa’s changing approaches to managing migration. The latter can be characterised as a switch from a tightly controlled system of labour migration aimed especially at meeting the needs of the country’s mining industries to the current, more turbulent and diverse forms of in-migration in which there is a great deal of surplus labour and far less control by the state. Both South Africa’s colonial and apartheid history and the present state’s difficulties in managing in-migration effectively and responding to the day-to- day challenges experienced by South Africans and cross-border migrants alike, are linked directly to the continued spread of xenophobic sentiments, discourses, practices, and the
1 This chapter contains substantial parts of my chapter ‘Social Justice’, published in Healy, L.M. & Link, R.L.
(2012) (eds.) Handbook of International Social Work: Human Rights, Development & the Global Profession, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, pp.44-51.
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sustained threat of violence. I conclude that in such a context, practitioners in the field of social work with cross-border can expect to face considerable ethical challenges.