In this post Nicola Hay from the University of the West of Scotland explores the challenge of remaining positive whilst doing social justice work. She draws on her own practice and research to suggest some approaches that can be taken up in the career guidance field.

Scrolling through Twitter you may find yourself inundated by tweets and causes related to a diverse range of issues; the ‘effects of poor housing on health’, ‘race, class and gender in the UK’, ‘privilege’, ‘universal credit’, ‘austerity’, ‘mental health’, ‘income inequality’, ‘disability benefits’, ‘a caravan of brown people to steal your jobs, ‘gender identity’ and ’12 years to event horizon unsustainable earth’.

When we look at the state of our shared world, it’s hard not to get anxious and this can make some people almost too attentive, to the point of paralysis, while inducing complete disengagement in others. Some may choose to switch off their digital worlds and retreat into a cocoon. Or maybe they just want to go dancing.

When Solzhenitsyn was asked by his neighbours what he was doing in 1938 and 1939 during the events that precipitated the Gulag legacy, Solzhenitsyn remembered that: ‘Some senior students had indeed been jailed’ . And when his neighbour asked what he made of it, Solzhenitsyn replied, ‘Nothing; we carried on dancing’.

But, while going dancing is appealing, many of us still want to see change. We would like to move to a political and economic system that results in the least amount of bloodshed, that aims to maximize equity and well-being for all citizens, and a system that never uses the language of oppression against any group in its pursuit of emancipation would be an ideal system. But how do we achieve this?

It is all about priorities. But it’s hard to know which social justice crisis to attend to first and where to place crises on the hierarchy of oppression scale. So the question is: do we retreat or do we dance?

Should we act?

For those of us employed within the public sector, third sector, education, professional development or research we simply cannot retreat. We are bounded and contracted by a neoliberal framework that has influenced governments everywhere.

As career practitioners, both the framework that we are working within and our desire for a better world are relevant to our practice. The careers world is only now rising from the ashes of a neoliberal paradigm that came to prominence in the 1970s. We are seeing researchers, like those involved with this site, critiquing and challenging neoliberal policies and legislation. These collective efforts have resulted in some positive changes, reminding us that ‘persistence beats resistance’.

In Scotland, we have tried to resist an economistic approach to education and career guidance, and as a result we have less fragmented careers provision than in England. This is not to say that neoliberal musings are not present within current Scottish Government policy, for example Skills Development Scotland is underpinned and informed by the National Performance Framework wherein GDP is a pre-eminent feature of the framework setting out the aims and purpose of Scottish Government.

As career guidance has developed it has become more interested in diversity, minority communities and intersecting identities. The contemporary context also requires career guidance practitioners to work with clients who have situated themselves within gendered, classed and racialized identities that influences perceptions of what job is possible for ‘people like them’. It is also important to acknowledge that some clients will have internalized the narratives of neoliberalism. As a practitioner, it is your role to challenge these internalized notions.

Drawing on my experience

From my own experiences of working in the third sector, there was often no time to read research and do deeper thinking about our practice. My team and I had to create ‘time resources’ outside of working hours to figure out how best to challenge prejudice, change attitudes and address the multiple oppressions experienced by the groups that we were working with.

I have written about some of the anti-racist interventions that were developed with colleagues whilst working with LGBT communities, Gypsy/Traveller communities, and refugees. This work was underpinned by two basic tenets.

• Different groups need to come together to reduce prejudicial attitudes and increase empathy. Building on the work of Gordon Allport’s contact theory (first set out in his book The Nature of Prejudice) we used the ‘out-group’ as a facilitator to help the ‘in-group’ to understand and overcome prejudice.
• One-off interventions are less likely to change attitudes. Based on this principle, the team and I worked to create sustainable programmes of equalities education wherein young people had time to explore and engage with complex issues and multiple heterogeneous identities clustered under race, ethnicity, nationality, culture and religion, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Despite the evidence underpinning these two principles we often found that funding constraints often prevented us from fully implementing them. For example, our ‘Out of Site’ project allowed us to include Scottish Travellers within the development and delivery of education, but it did not allow a long-term engagement. Funding limitations have also created problems in evaluating and evidencing the impact of both social justice interventions and career guidance.

Remaining optimistic

Despite these challenges I remain optimistic. I believe career guidance is an appropriate means for transforming social structures. As career practitioners or researchers it might be difficult to believe that we can alter social structures. We can however, be part of trans-disciplinary discussions on creating an economic system built on principles of wellbeing and social justice while working with and against aspects of our current paradigm. Through collective organising we can lobby governments to ensure that there are sufficient resources for practitioners to explore equalities issues and embed them in to practice.

In consideration of the meso- and micro- levels, as practitioners we are at the vanguard, stationed at the intersecting front line between deficiency needs, the education system and the labour market. Not only do we have discussions with young people about their interests and the things that make them feel alive, we also link these interests to the labour market in order to help young people understand the opportunities that are available to them, providing support and bridging social capital. While we are waiting on the next Hayek, Keynes, Rawls or Marx to disseminate a new economic system possibly through a YouTube video, we need to collectively and persistently be looking for ways to use neoliberalism as a means to address inequality whilst simultaneously resisting the socially unjust practices from within the current paradigm.

We need to see where we can draw on inspiration from our community and build on the extraordinary work already taking place throughout the world. The establishment of the Career Guidance for Social Justice website is a great example of the field responding to the changing world of work and fostering equality. It creates a space where we can co-develop, share resources and amplify examples of socially just practice within the field.

Finally, we must always remember to dance. As Emma Goldman said, ‘A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having’.

A very special thanks to Professor Colin Clark and Luke Campbell for giving their time and providing advice, guidance and editing.