Shoshana Pollack
Biographic Data
| ID | 4076311 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shoshana Pollack |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shoshana |
| FAMILY NAME | Pollack |
| SIGNATURE | POLLACK S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wilfrid Laurier University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8816-1321 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 122 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Disrupting Assumptions and the Walls to Bridges Program
In her influential paper Innocence Lost, Suspicion Found Rossiter (2001) ponders whether to educate ‘for or against’ social work, teasing out the harms of ‘dividing practices’ that reinscribe class and race-based violations. I am interested in Rossiter’s assertation that ethical practice requires educators and practitioners to maintain a constant vigilance and skepticism about our professional knowledges and practices that often confirm inequalit…
The how of social justice education in social work
Teaching courses on social justice are mainstays of social work education and are considered imperative for ethically responsible social work practice. Social justice education comes with many challenges, including white settler student resistance and difficulties translating social justice content into social work practice. We suggest a move from viewing social justice practice as a value or skill set - as part of the ‘professional self’ – to on…
Walls to Bridges
This special issue of Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) focuses on Walls to Bridges, a prison education program that brings together incarcerated and non-incarcerated students for university and college classes in a prison setting.Inspired by the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program based in the United States, Walls to Brides (W2B) Canada was established in 2011.W2B began as a single university course off ered through the Faculty of Social Work…
Walls to Bridges
Walls to Bridges (W2B) is a university-based program that brings incarcerated and campus-enrolled students to study together in correctional settings for semester-long classes.The concept of 'walls to bridges' refl ects the eff orts to build connections between those who are incarcerated and those who are not, to develop partnerships between the commonly separated systems of post-secondary education and correctional institutions, and to provide r…
Creative Writing and Decolonizing Intersectional Feminist Critical Reflexivity
Creative writing during the COVID-19 pandemic can serve as a decolonizing intersectional feminist method for critical self-reflexivity. We share responses to the prompt: “If my therapeutic practice came with a warning label in COVID-19, what would it say?” and provide an analysis of the neoliberalism, whiteness, and colonialism embedded in our creative writing and practice. Engaging in critical self-reflexivity through metaphor carries potential …
Walls to Bridges
Walls to Bridges
Transformative Praxis With Incarcerated Women
The ever-widening net of racialized and colonial carceral spaces and neoliberal strategies of control of poor and marginalized communities means that social workers are often in positions of complicity with or resistance to (or both) the norms and practices of the carceral state. Feminist praxis can both challenge and inadvertently sustain the prison industrial complex and its harms. Approaches that even tacitly accept some of the basic premises …
Building Bridges
This article reports on a study of student experiences of a Walls to Bridges (W2B) class taught by Faculty of Social Work instructors in a Canadian women’s prison. The Walls to Bridges (W2B) program is based on the U. S. Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program and brings students from the university together with students from the prison to study for a semester long course in correctional settings. The article reports on how the program pedagogy of ex…
Susan Starr Sered and Maureen Norton-Hawk, Can’t Catch a Break
Changing the Rules of the Game”
Family therapy has recently begun to pay attention to the effects of structural oppression on immigrant lives. However, the research on this topic is scarce, especially in the case of immigrants privileged in terms of race, professionalism and legal status. The reported study explored the effect of macro factors—barriers to labor market and shift to nuclear family organization—on relational dynamics in 10 white professional heterosexual Jewish co…
An imprisoning gaze
This article examines how correctional systems absorb feminist-inspired reformist discourses that focus upon women's victimization as a ‘pathway’ to incarceration. Through the absorption process the concept of gender loses its socio-economic and political resonance, centering instead the psychological effects of gender oppression. A psychological notion of gender has been used to individualize and pathologize criminalized women through prison pro…
Contestation and Accommodation
This article examines the ways in which dominant discourses about poor lone mothers are both contested and accommodated among three groups of actors within the workfare system in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on qualitative data from a national research project on lone mothers and social assistance, the authors examine and analyze how lone mothers construct their own subjectivity, as well as how it is constructed by workers in state-contracted nongove…
Labelling Clients 'Risky
The literature on neo-liberal transformations of the welfare state and forms of governance—inspired by Foucault's concept of governmentality—has much to offer theorizations of the role of social work in contemporary society. Rather than assuming a top/down analysis in which power is located within individuals or institutions, power is ‘not a matter of imposing a sovereign will, but instead a process of enlisting the cooperation of chains of actor…
Creating submissive subjects
The Lone Mothers: Building Social Inclusion project is a collaboration between researchers at five universities and community organisations in three research sites in Canada. The aim of this five-year longitudinal study is to examine the social assistance and labour market experiences of lone mothers. Drawing on qualitative interviews with lone mothers receiving social assistance in three Canadian provinces, as well as a focus group conducted wit…
Developing Shared Knowledge
Families engaged with the Anglo-American child welfare system frequently feel as though their own experiences, perspectives and needs are given less credence than those of child protection workers. While this is attributable to a range of factors, a central issue revolves around how and what information is obtained, interpreted and shared by those in the child welfare system as information sharing can be utilised by service providers as a means o…
You Can't Have it Both Ways”
In this article, I report on findings from a qualitative study with 68 formerly incarcerated women in Canada which examined their experiences of imprisonment and release to the community. Data from this study illustrate a disjuncture between women-centered correctional policy rhetoric and the lived experience of incarceration. Programming is greatly affected by the prison culture of punishment and control and thus is not generally experienced as …
I'm Just Not Good in Relationships“
This article examines how risk discourses carry specific gendered meanings within the context of women-centered correctional practices. Based on interviews with 52 women who served federal prison sentences in Canada, the author examines how abused women are constructed as violent and the discursive and practical implications of this construction. Feminist-informed victimization narratives merge with correctional risk discourses to govern criminal…
Negotiating Contradictions
Front-line workers, advocates, researchers and correctional officials in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. have recognized the high proportion of imprisoned women who have experienced childhood sexual abuse and have called for the development of appropriate prison counseling services that take into account women's histories of trauma (Battle et al., 2003; Covington, 1998; Covington&Bloom, 2003; Scott, 2004; Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women, 19…
Taming The Shrew
Anti-oppressive Social Work Practice with Women in Prison
Journal Article Anti-oppressive Social Work Practice with Women in Prison: Discursive Reconstructions and Alternative Practices Get access Shoshana Pollack Shoshana Pollack Shoshana Pollack is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. She teaches courses in clinical practice with individuals, differential use of self and gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender issues in social work. Her research inte…
Focus-Group Methodology in Research with Incarcerated Women
Feminist researchers have found focus groups to be valuable for understanding collective experiences of marginalization, developing a structural analysis of individual experiences, and challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and class. These benefits are in contrast to individual interviews, which may lend themselves to privatized and individualistic accounts of gendered experiences and which risk reproducing colo…
Reconceptualizing Women's Agency and Empowerment
This paper examines various understandings of “empowerment” and provides a critique of the way it is currently being adopted to describe the needs and experiences of women who break the law. Specifically, this paper examines the implications of a predominantly psychological notion of empowerment on how we conceive of women's agency and women's choices. In an effort to expand approaches to women's empowerment and women's agency beyond an individua…
Focus-Group Methodology in Research with Incarcerated Women
Feminist researchers have found focus groups to be valuable for understanding collective experiences of marginalization, developing a structural analysis of individual experiences, and challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and class. These benefits are in contrast to individual interviews, which may lend themselves to privatized and individualistic accounts of gendered experiences and which risk reproducing colo…
Labelling Clients 'Risky
The literature on neo-liberal transformations of the welfare state and forms of governance—inspired by Foucault's concept of governmentality—has much to offer theorizations of the role of social work in contemporary society. Rather than assuming a top/down analysis in which power is located within individuals or institutions, power is ‘not a matter of imposing a sovereign will, but instead a process of enlisting the cooperation of chains of actor…
I'm Just Not Good in Relationships“
This article examines how risk discourses carry specific gendered meanings within the context of women-centered correctional practices. Based on interviews with 52 women who served federal prison sentences in Canada, the author examines how abused women are constructed as violent and the discursive and practical implications of this construction. Feminist-informed victimization narratives merge with correctional risk discourses to govern criminal…
An imprisoning gaze
This article examines how correctional systems absorb feminist-inspired reformist discourses that focus upon women's victimization as a ‘pathway’ to incarceration. Through the absorption process the concept of gender loses its socio-economic and political resonance, centering instead the psychological effects of gender oppression. A psychological notion of gender has been used to individualize and pathologize criminalized women through prison pro…
Taming The Shrew
You Can't Have it Both Ways”
In this article, I report on findings from a qualitative study with 68 formerly incarcerated women in Canada which examined their experiences of imprisonment and release to the community. Data from this study illustrate a disjuncture between women-centered correctional policy rhetoric and the lived experience of incarceration. Programming is greatly affected by the prison culture of punishment and control and thus is not generally experienced as …
Anti-oppressive Social Work Practice with Women in Prison
Journal Article Anti-oppressive Social Work Practice with Women in Prison: Discursive Reconstructions and Alternative Practices Get access Shoshana Pollack Shoshana Pollack Shoshana Pollack is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. She teaches courses in clinical practice with individuals, differential use of self and gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender issues in social work. Her research inte…
Transformative Praxis With Incarcerated Women
The ever-widening net of racialized and colonial carceral spaces and neoliberal strategies of control of poor and marginalized communities means that social workers are often in positions of complicity with or resistance to (or both) the norms and practices of the carceral state. Feminist praxis can both challenge and inadvertently sustain the prison industrial complex and its harms. Approaches that even tacitly accept some of the basic premises …
Negotiating Contradictions
Front-line workers, advocates, researchers and correctional officials in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. have recognized the high proportion of imprisoned women who have experienced childhood sexual abuse and have called for the development of appropriate prison counseling services that take into account women's histories of trauma (Battle et al., 2003; Covington, 1998; Covington&Bloom, 2003; Scott, 2004; Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women, 19…
Contestation and Accommodation
This article examines the ways in which dominant discourses about poor lone mothers are both contested and accommodated among three groups of actors within the workfare system in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on qualitative data from a national research project on lone mothers and social assistance, the authors examine and analyze how lone mothers construct their own subjectivity, as well as how it is constructed by workers in state-contracted nongove…
Developing Shared Knowledge
Families engaged with the Anglo-American child welfare system frequently feel as though their own experiences, perspectives and needs are given less credence than those of child protection workers. While this is attributable to a range of factors, a central issue revolves around how and what information is obtained, interpreted and shared by those in the child welfare system as information sharing can be utilised by service providers as a means o…
Creative Writing and Decolonizing Intersectional Feminist Critical Reflexivity
Creative writing during the COVID-19 pandemic can serve as a decolonizing intersectional feminist method for critical self-reflexivity. We share responses to the prompt: “If my therapeutic practice came with a warning label in COVID-19, what would it say?” and provide an analysis of the neoliberalism, whiteness, and colonialism embedded in our creative writing and practice. Engaging in critical self-reflexivity through metaphor carries potential …
Building Bridges
This article reports on a study of student experiences of a Walls to Bridges (W2B) class taught by Faculty of Social Work instructors in a Canadian women’s prison. The Walls to Bridges (W2B) program is based on the U. S. Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program and brings students from the university together with students from the prison to study for a semester long course in correctional settings. The article reports on how the program pedagogy of ex…
Changing the Rules of the Game”
Family therapy has recently begun to pay attention to the effects of structural oppression on immigrant lives. However, the research on this topic is scarce, especially in the case of immigrants privileged in terms of race, professionalism and legal status. The reported study explored the effect of macro factors—barriers to labor market and shift to nuclear family organization—on relational dynamics in 10 white professional heterosexual Jewish co…
Reconceptualizing Women's Agency and Empowerment
This paper examines various understandings of “empowerment” and provides a critique of the way it is currently being adopted to describe the needs and experiences of women who break the law. Specifically, this paper examines the implications of a predominantly psychological notion of empowerment on how we conceive of women's agency and women's choices. In an effort to expand approaches to women's empowerment and women's agency beyond an individua…
Focus-Group Methodology in Research with Incarcerated Women
Feminist researchers have found focus groups to be valuable for understanding collective experiences of marginalization, developing a structural analysis of individual experiences, and challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and class. These benefits are in contrast to individual interviews, which may lend themselves to privatized and individualistic accounts of gendered experiences and which risk reproducing colo…
Anti-oppressive Social Work Practice with Women in Prison
Journal Article Anti-oppressive Social Work Practice with Women in Prison: Discursive Reconstructions and Alternative Practices Get access Shoshana Pollack Shoshana Pollack Shoshana Pollack is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. She teaches courses in clinical practice with individuals, differential use of self and gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender issues in social work. Her research inte…
Taming The Shrew
I'm Just Not Good in Relationships“
This article examines how risk discourses carry specific gendered meanings within the context of women-centered correctional practices. Based on interviews with 52 women who served federal prison sentences in Canada, the author examines how abused women are constructed as violent and the discursive and practical implications of this construction. Feminist-informed victimization narratives merge with correctional risk discourses to govern criminal…
Negotiating Contradictions
Front-line workers, advocates, researchers and correctional officials in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. have recognized the high proportion of imprisoned women who have experienced childhood sexual abuse and have called for the development of appropriate prison counseling services that take into account women's histories of trauma (Battle et al., 2003; Covington, 1998; Covington&Bloom, 2003; Scott, 2004; Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women, 19…
Creating submissive subjects
The Lone Mothers: Building Social Inclusion project is a collaboration between researchers at five universities and community organisations in three research sites in Canada. The aim of this five-year longitudinal study is to examine the social assistance and labour market experiences of lone mothers. Drawing on qualitative interviews with lone mothers receiving social assistance in three Canadian provinces, as well as a focus group conducted wit…
Developing Shared Knowledge
Families engaged with the Anglo-American child welfare system frequently feel as though their own experiences, perspectives and needs are given less credence than those of child protection workers. While this is attributable to a range of factors, a central issue revolves around how and what information is obtained, interpreted and shared by those in the child welfare system as information sharing can be utilised by service providers as a means o…
You Can't Have it Both Ways”
In this article, I report on findings from a qualitative study with 68 formerly incarcerated women in Canada which examined their experiences of imprisonment and release to the community. Data from this study illustrate a disjuncture between women-centered correctional policy rhetoric and the lived experience of incarceration. Programming is greatly affected by the prison culture of punishment and control and thus is not generally experienced as …
Contestation and Accommodation
This article examines the ways in which dominant discourses about poor lone mothers are both contested and accommodated among three groups of actors within the workfare system in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on qualitative data from a national research project on lone mothers and social assistance, the authors examine and analyze how lone mothers construct their own subjectivity, as well as how it is constructed by workers in state-contracted nongove…
Labelling Clients 'Risky
The literature on neo-liberal transformations of the welfare state and forms of governance—inspired by Foucault's concept of governmentality—has much to offer theorizations of the role of social work in contemporary society. Rather than assuming a top/down analysis in which power is located within individuals or institutions, power is ‘not a matter of imposing a sovereign will, but instead a process of enlisting the cooperation of chains of actor…
An imprisoning gaze
This article examines how correctional systems absorb feminist-inspired reformist discourses that focus upon women's victimization as a ‘pathway’ to incarceration. Through the absorption process the concept of gender loses its socio-economic and political resonance, centering instead the psychological effects of gender oppression. A psychological notion of gender has been used to individualize and pathologize criminalized women through prison pro…
Changing the Rules of the Game”
Family therapy has recently begun to pay attention to the effects of structural oppression on immigrant lives. However, the research on this topic is scarce, especially in the case of immigrants privileged in terms of race, professionalism and legal status. The reported study explored the effect of macro factors—barriers to labor market and shift to nuclear family organization—on relational dynamics in 10 white professional heterosexual Jewish co…
Susan Starr Sered and Maureen Norton-Hawk, Can’t Catch a Break
Building Bridges
This article reports on a study of student experiences of a Walls to Bridges (W2B) class taught by Faculty of Social Work instructors in a Canadian women’s prison. The Walls to Bridges (W2B) program is based on the U. S. Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program and brings students from the university together with students from the prison to study for a semester long course in correctional settings. The article reports on how the program pedagogy of ex…
Transformative Praxis With Incarcerated Women
The ever-widening net of racialized and colonial carceral spaces and neoliberal strategies of control of poor and marginalized communities means that social workers are often in positions of complicity with or resistance to (or both) the norms and practices of the carceral state. Feminist praxis can both challenge and inadvertently sustain the prison industrial complex and its harms. Approaches that even tacitly accept some of the basic premises …
Walls to Bridges
Walls to Bridges
Walls to Bridges
Walls to Bridges (W2B) is a university-based program that brings incarcerated and campus-enrolled students to study together in correctional settings for semester-long classes.The concept of 'walls to bridges' refl ects the eff orts to build connections between those who are incarcerated and those who are not, to develop partnerships between the commonly separated systems of post-secondary education and correctional institutions, and to provide r…
Creative Writing and Decolonizing Intersectional Feminist Critical Reflexivity
Creative writing during the COVID-19 pandemic can serve as a decolonizing intersectional feminist method for critical self-reflexivity. We share responses to the prompt: “If my therapeutic practice came with a warning label in COVID-19, what would it say?” and provide an analysis of the neoliberalism, whiteness, and colonialism embedded in our creative writing and practice. Engaging in critical self-reflexivity through metaphor carries potential …
Walls to Bridges
This special issue of Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) focuses on Walls to Bridges, a prison education program that brings together incarcerated and non-incarcerated students for university and college classes in a prison setting.Inspired by the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program based in the United States, Walls to Brides (W2B) Canada was established in 2011.W2B began as a single university course off ered through the Faculty of Social Work…
Disrupting Assumptions and the Walls to Bridges Program
In her influential paper Innocence Lost, Suspicion Found Rossiter (2001) ponders whether to educate ‘for or against’ social work, teasing out the harms of ‘dividing practices’ that reinscribe class and race-based violations. I am interested in Rossiter’s assertation that ethical practice requires educators and practitioners to maintain a constant vigilance and skepticism about our professional knowledges and practices that often confirm inequalit…
The how of social justice education in social work
Teaching courses on social justice are mainstays of social work education and are considered imperative for ethically responsible social work practice. Social justice education comes with many challenges, including white settler student resistance and difficulties translating social justice content into social work practice. We suggest a move from viewing social justice practice as a value or skill set - as part of the ‘professional self’ – to on…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (10 works) · Criminology (10 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Social Work Education and Practice (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Law (8 works)