Epistemological binds and ethical dilemmas in frontline child welfare practice

Child welfare workers are charged with the dual tasks of gathering factual information about their clients and using interpretive skills to understand their clients’ emotions and engage themin services. This ethnographic study of caseworkers at a foster care adoption programidentifies the tension between demands to generate knowledge about clients from a detached, or what the Department of Child Welfare refers to as “objective,” perspective and calls to understand clients from an embodied perspective (perspectivalism) as an important epistemological dilemma wired into everyday child welfare work. For caseworkers, the objectivity/perspectivalism conundrumfrequently presents as a crisis of evidence, wherein perspectival knowledge about clients conflicts with knowledge that can be documented objectively. Because objectivity is the privileged norm for making decisions in child welfare, I find that workers in this study employed techniques of objectification, or strategies in which perspectival information was made to appear objective, in order to constitute legitimate evidence.