Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

We have used these ideas in classes on social work history and on social
work theory and practice and research methods. All types of students found
it a very valuable experience, which reveals the constructed nature of social
problems and the ideology that has always been embedded in social policy and
social work. Photos representing various activities of orphans in institutions
are viewed in our study 10 as messages in the wider ideological and cultural context
of the 1930–1940s, echoing professional media discourse created around
the principles and values of Soviet upbringing and presented in chronicles and
children’s cinematography. We examine and discuss with students the pictures
from the orphanages’ albums, which manifest such principles as social hygiene,
collectivity, ‘cultureness’, and labour participation, all of which are cornerstones
of the concept of institutional upbringing (Figure 1).
The political-ideological context influencing the selection of materials, defines
the limits of individual freedoms and the subjectivity of the figures, which tend to
be represented in a social rather than individual dimension. Some visual units of
analysis that we have considered as texts, are subjected to deconstruction, in order
to show the interconnectedness between consumption and production in the practice
of photography. Welfare policy is considered a contextual background for the
understanding of ideology and specific social practices of care and control, embedded
in the images themselves and in their own histories of creation and use.
Figure 1. Photo from
the album of a children’s
orphanage in 1947.
This image portrays
social hygiene and
collectivity as elements
of socialist upbringing
– the children are depicted
as self-sufficient,
disciplined, clean and
happy.
10
Pavel Romanov and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova, “Landscapes of memory: reading photo albums” in Visual Anthropology:
new visions of social reality, ed. E. Iarskaia-Smirnova, P. Romanov and V. Krutkin (Saratov: Nauchnaia
kniga, 2007): 146-168 (in Russian).
63