The Deconstruction of Professional Knowledge: Accountability without Authority
In: Families in society: the journal of contemporary human services, Volume 83, Issue 5, p. 493-498
ISSN: 1945-1350
Many practitioners feel a growing despair over the foundations of their knowledge—over what it is they can claim to know—and how they are supposed to use this knowledge to help rather than disempower the people they serve. This paper argues that our accountability to the people we serve will come not from efforts to prove the authority of our knowledge, but from a more reflective and dialogic engagement with our knowledge, and with the people served through it—an engagement that seeks constantly to problematize our knowing, to probe and critique it, to trace its origins and assumptions, and explore its implications, to open it to inquiry and transformation.