Start from a graduate student who is trouble in the master thesis: The social work professional empire writes back

• Main Authors: Kuo, Chih Nan, 郭志南
• Other Authors: Wang, Tsen Yung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/67mhem

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 社會工作研究所 === 101 === This thesis originated from a chaotic life that I led as a graduate student who could not produce a qualified master thesis on social work. Later, moved and inspired by self-narration, I, who used to be familiar with quantitative scientific experimental methodology, boldly made up my mind to choose postmodern autoethnography as the research methodology, to reflexively investigate on my own life story in which “I” could not complete a thesis. Therefore, I started to write and narrate about “myself,” with multiple identities of “a graduate student who couldn’t write a thesis,” “ the only son from a working class family,” “a social worker from a university of technology,” and “a graduate student in Social Work Department of NCCU,” hoping to reconstruct a full view of how “I” became “a graduate student who could not produce a master thesis.” Therefore, following the tracks by narrating and writing about the multiple selves in my life, and repetitive self-questioning and self-answering to distinguish the things reflected by the inner desire, I gradually overcame the self-suspiciousness and unconscious inferiority complex that imprison my true self after constantly going through and swinging between inner and outer conflicts, oppressed self-identity and social/historical context. Then I orderly connected the life/professional ideology that disciplined and repressed the subjects to the society’s collective experience and social /historical context constructed by the establishment history of professional social work in Taiwan, from where I terminally realized why “I” could not produce my own master thesis. On the one hand, it was because I as an individual was trapped in the big subject, namely the development history of social work profession in Taiwan (the subject of social work profession empire/ American social work profession) and the subjective history(self-colonized subject/ highly-educated social workers), and dominated or controlled by multiple subjects of local social work. On the other hand, it perfectly presented the institutional process of social work in Taiwan, in which most members from many social groups are hardly aware of or clear about how the profession system/ knowledge example they believe and acquaint with results in misunderstanding and fake ideology of excluding others in the realization of local social work. Last but not least, during the process of narrating and writing the thesis, I realized that the so-called helping profession means that helping professionals should know how to make themselves “the weaker/ the other/ the inferior” so that they can personally experience the daily of the minority groups instead of seeking for a higher and more noble social status. As a result, I can finally say to myself that there is no need to feel self-abased about my own embarrassing past. The suffering and difficulties in the past including being excluded by members of social groups, and being censured as the other/ the inferior now become nutrients for me to understand that I am more competent and qualified to be “a good social worker.” Therefore, I will try my best to be the real me and feel comfortable in such an oppressing and conflicting society, which is also the social work profession that I should hold on to, to look for, and to put into practice.