Every day, we navigate a series of roles, each tailored to fit the social and professional spheres we inhabit. From the clothes we choose to the language we adopt; each act is a performance tailored to the audience before us. It’s as simple as wearing a bindi when we go to a wedding but a blazer at an interview or swapping an “aama” for an “achha” with that one friend from Delhi. Daily, in interactions with different people in various places, I manoeuvre in and out of roles and corresponding personalities. I adopt codes of clothing, speaking, and moving with ease, barely breaking a sweat juggling “who I am.”

Except when it comes to work. I work with the Communities Enabling Foundational Learning project at the Madhi Foundation, which aims to support parent engagement in foundational learning and to enable parents to demand quality primary education in the ecosystem. By equipping parents with essential tools and fostering their agency, the foundation seeks to create a demand for improved foundational literacy and numeracy outcomes. I believe this community-centric model not only aims to elevate educational standards but also to build a sustainable ecosystem where parents are empowered to actively participate in and influence their children’s learning journey.

My work involves regular travel for visits and conversations with parents, local leaders, community members, and our field team. On travel days, picking out aversion of myself isn’t without a moral debate. The task of aligning my personal identity with my professional role becomes a dance of authenticity and perception. The certainty of my role wavers: Who am I going to be today? Who must I be to connect, belong, and, most importantly, make a meaningful difference?

I pick from a set of cheap cotton Kurtis and pants, a dupatta that deliberately doesn’t match and wear no kajal. I prepare myself for entire conversations without using a word of English and consciously avoid mentioning where I live, how much I make,
and whether I’m married or have kids to hide my reality of being an urban-bred “modern” woman. Ironically, I also prepare myself to come off as less private or reserved than I usually am in an attempt to be accepted or listened to. Yet, despite all my efforts to supposedly “fit in,” on certain occasions, I stuck out like a sore thumb. My ankle-length pants were discussed for missing two inches; it was assumed that I would have a problem walking in the sun or sitting on the floor, and I constantly heard, “You wouldn’t understand.” The personas I donned didn’t seem to fit physically or culturally!

I received a lot of well-meaning advice at the time that to work with communities, I had to be a “part” of the community. However, I wasn’t sure what that meant, especially when I didn’t have the option of physically relocating to live there. Not to mention, I was working with six different communities. There was no handbook for me at the time prescribing that I had to undergo this process of creating an alternate identity to work with communities. Yet, somehow, it was a deeply ingrained belief—I had to hide parts of myself. Despite doing this knowingly or unknowingly in other parts of my life, here, it didn’t feel okay.

This feeling of standing out, despite my best efforts, highlights a broader challenge identified by Miu Chang Yun. Yun’s exploration of cultural tensions in social work practice delves into the complexities between social workers, clients, organizations, and society. He observes that “the cultural tensions caused by cultural similarities and differences between workers and their clients may be the most complicated and critical tensions that social workers encounter in their daily practice.” These tensions can arise from differences or similarities in ethnicity, age, gender, language, race, socio-economic class, caste, religion, nationality, and more.

In my case, I am walking a fine line between differences and similarities. On one hand, sharing the same nationality, language, and gender can create a sense of mutual understanding or shared experience. On the other hand, differences in caste, socio-economic class, age, and the urban/rural divide emphasize the underlying disparities. It can sometimes be difficult to navigate my own understanding of where our shared experiences end and the differences begin. This also makes it challenging to identify the blurred boundaries between personal and professional interactions.

However, there is more to this cultural tension than meets the eye. The paper “Social Worker Identity: A Profession in Context” highlights a simple truth—the nature of social work involves engaging with communities or groups that are often marginalized or oppressed. Organizations typically work with groups oppressed on the basis of race, caste, class, gender, religion, and more.

Yan also finds that social workers are hardly culturally neutral due to their embodied socio-organizational and professional cultural baggage, as well as the nature of their work with communities. Extrapolating from this thought, we begin to see cultural tensions not as merely personal but as deeply rooted in the very construction of my role and the profession itself. Having agency over organizational resources, stepping into communities with a predetermined program objective and design, and assuming the role of an “expert” inherently carries a paternalistic attitude.

Yan’s insight regarding the inherent lack of cultural neutrality among social workers resonates deeply with my experiences. Reflecting on my position in relation to the parents I work with, notions of creating empowerment and agency have begun to feel flimsy. In our drive for professionalization, we have replaced moral superiority with professional expertise, while retaining the power to define the client, the reality, and the therapy (Hartman, 1993). With all this baggage following us in every conversation, is wearing a dupatta really what makes me more “the same”?

Cultural tensions require a high level of sensitivity for social workers to reflect on their own cultural positions. Therefore, it is not surprising that cultural awareness becomes a key requirement for social work practitioners (Yan, 2008). One must engage in critical self-reflection about their own cultural positioning and the arising tensions before beginning to navigate and address the cultural tensions that emerge when interacting with the communities they serve.

Recognizing the need for heightened sensitivity to navigate cultural tensions, I turned to Lum’s formative work Culturally Competent Practice for guidance—a framework in which cultural awareness is a key component, and “professional self-disclosure” is a skill Lum believes all social workers must possess. This skill involves taking the initiative in building a relationship with the client by disclosing a mutual area of interest—not pretending to have something in common, but genuinely finding common ground. In hindsight, this seems obvious, as relationships are built on honesty and transparency just as much as on relatability. Beyond that, why do we underestimate people’s ability to be receptive to others who are unlike them?

Some of Lum’s suggestions, which I found useful were:

Approaching every interpersonal helping practice relationship with an awareness of who you are as a cultural self and what you have to offer as a helping person. This helps remove any disillusioned notion of being culturally neutral and identify one’s own agency and limitations. Find out what is similar and common between you as the worker and the person as the client, but also explore differences, respecting them and learning from them. Reflecting on Lum’s suggestions, I found parallels with my earlier dilemmas regarding authenticity in interaction. His advice prompts a reconsideration of my approach, moving away from superficial adjustments. This can look like
engaging in an honest conversation about why I haven’t got married yet or being honest about not wanting to discuss it. We’d also bond over our experiences with the children around us—my students and nieces/nephews and their children. Through these conversations, I’ve received feedback from community members that they feel more comfortable being themselves around me.
Understanding and respecting how each of us constructed and shaped our multiple identities and how social, political, and historical forces have impacted and caused us to be who we are today. The goal is for the client to be empowered, not for me to be an empowerer. I’ve approached this by co-creating elements of the core project design with community members, constantly asking for feedback and implementing it, and being honest about what is within my locus of control. To me, this is a step towards creating shared agency and sustainable change.

In the ever-evolving landscape of social work, the pursuit of cultural competence demands both professional and personal commitment. Reflecting on our daily interactions, we must ask ourselves: How do our cultural backgrounds and biases shape the way we engage with those we aim to serve? This question, though potentially unsettling, should inspire deeper introspection and learning.

We must know ourselves and be ourselves, having faith that clients can accept and work with us even if we are different, as long as we share the same goals. Additionally, we must understand the structures and constraints of the institutions we work in, acknowledging that these institutions can contribute to problems as well as solutions. Most importantly, we must accept that a client may not always find us the best person to work with, and in such cases, we should help them find who or what will work best