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BJSW Advance Access originally published online on March 4, 2008
British Journal of Social Work 2008 38(4):771-787; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcn015
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved

Making Refugees: A Historical Discourse Analysis of the Construction of the ‘Refugee’ in US Social Work, 1900–1957

Yoosun Park

Yoosun Park is an Assistant Professor at the Smith College School for Social Work in the USA. She is interested in applying the theories and methods of poststructuralism to the study of social work history and the analysis of present day practices. Her work is focused on the critical study of social work with immigrants and refugees and the intersecting discourses of race, racism, culture, and the issues of legal and social citizenship.

Correspondence to Yoosun Park, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, School for Social Work, Lilly Hall, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063, USA. Email: ypark2{at}email.smith.edu


  Abstract

This paper traces the discursive constructions through which refugees were produced as particular kinds of subjects in US social work discourse in the first half of the twentieth century. Prior to the onset of the Second World War, the refugee ideal was valorized in social work discourse to both exhort and contest immigration restrictions. In the war years, actual refugees became framed, instead, as the most troublesome immigrants. The many anti-restrictionists among social work's leaders persistently and prolifically opposed problematized constructions of refugees. But through its uncritical uses of the same unstable measures of fitness through which the problematized identities were constructed, the liberal, anti-restrictionist discourse of social work re-inscribed the discourses it sought to counter. As a study of the disciplinary construction of a particularly vulnerable identity, and a methodological exemplar for examining key constructs, this analysis has broad implication for study of the many categories of identity (e.g. child, client, etc.) upon which social work builds its practice models and explanatory theories.

Keywords: refugees, immigrants, historical discourse analysis, poststructuralism, identity


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P. Westoby and A. Ingamells
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