Towards radical praxis through a new formation in practice development

Background: This paper argues that achieving social and cultural transformation in healthcare, and beyond, needs to come from an orientation of an explicit ethical stance around critical awareness and articulation of the affects of historical, political, social and cultural structures of oppression. There is discussion around how practice development language forms a discourse of harm, and how practice development environments reproduce and maintain structures of oppression.

Aim: Drawing on the work of feminist critical social praxis concerned with corporeal experiences and the affects emanating from embodied practices, this paper will bring to the fore marginalisations and oppressions experienced by particular bodies, and ask what do practice developers need to consider and act on to make practice development more socially just?

Method: Application of feminist critical social praxis, a theoretical dimension thus far unexplored in the practice development field, as a framework for asking what practice development can learn. Particular attention is drawn to the benefits of orientating a new formation in practice development around the work of Black feminists and feminists of colour – of looking to the margins and bringing those centre.

Findings: Illumination of new insights into how to build a feminist critical social justice oriented practice development through the explicit practice of naming and raising consciousness around the lived experiences and materiality of oppressed and marginalised peoples.
Conclusion: Achieving radical cultural, social, political and economic transformation needs to come from an orientation of explicit critical awareness and recognition of the politics of affects of neoliberal, neo-colonial capitalist systems.

Implications for practice: A feminist critical social justice ethical stance can enable practice development, as a methodology, and practice developers as implementers of that methodology, to respond to this paper’s invitation to stand in solidarity against systematic structural oppressions and form a new more reflective, critical and socially just practice development.