More on Empowerment - Short

[WB-TrainConsult]

Don,

I got your point. An interesting second go for the thread.

It happens quite often to me, that after critizising a word for
beeing unaccurate, misleading etc. I still have to live with the
fact, that for historical reasins it is THE word used by most of the
people. So I redefine what it means to me and continue going to use
it.

The problem is, this condems the people I am communicating with, to
go through the same fases of mis-understanding, critizising,
redefining, or/and condems me to explain again and again, what I mean
by X-(old word, new meaning) which produces lots of confusion and
difficult points in the communication.

This can be useful and rich, if the conditions for such a
communication process are in place. It can be quite misleading, if
this is not the case.

Then there is the problem of TRUTH & Common Accessibility to
knowledge:
Good 'publicly used' terms express 'by themselves', what they are
meant to point at, without lots of explanation.

And there is the POLITICAL aspect:
An example: Of course many men will argue that when you use the word
"man" it means "hu-man" and not "he-man". But it is then so easy to
fall back continuing the traditional way of thinking, feeling,
communicating about gender-issues. So many feministic humans think,
the point is so crucial, that the words they use, must reflect the
power-struggle, not hide it.

So the question is: is the discussion of what empowerment is and is
not, crucial enough to 'force' my surrounding into this discussion,
or not? If not, the option to continue using the old word, and
eventually comment it in a critical way, explaining the up-to-then
implicit redefinition, seems to be a good solution.

If yes, it is worth to find a word, which in itself expresses the new
definition/critique of the old word. But if I remember well, there
came no such  constructive solution up during the discussion in the
list.

Just NOT USING the word "empowerment", because of it beeing
"fundamentally wrong" which was something, many of the guys in the
discussion of this thread expressed as their way of dealing with it,
seems to be half-hearted to me, although I can see it as a way of
constructive counter-dependency against this Mega-term of the 90's in
the areas of consultancy and development cooperations.

So I am happy that you reopend the discussion.

I did not follow the complete discussion because of lack of time, so
perhaps I am wrong.

Bernhard.

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On Tue, 28 May 2002 11:20:16 -0700, Don Ferretti wrote:
I missed a lot of the 'empowerment" conversation so I'm not sure how
relevant this comment is. I assume the moderator will screen it. But,
at one time I could not stand the word or the concept of empowerment.
I thought it was patronizing, condescending and generally came from a
world view that some people were better than other people. I have
since changed my mind about the word and the concept because I
started to see it not so much as giving power to people (cuz they
already had it) but instead I see it as creating environments where
people could rightly see that they are at the center of their world
(because sometimes people lose sight of that) and that their
thoughts/actions can make changes happen - they have the power. So,
when I started seeing the empowerment lense as a way to affirm that
central role, I started liking the term.

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