A Socio-constructionist Career Counselling Model Grounded in the Intersectionality of Gender, Class and Race/Ethnicity

Abstract

This chapter discusses a proposed model of socio-constructionist career counselling (CC) grounded in the intersectionality of gender, class, and race/ethnicity. It further covers the case study of a 30-year-old lower socioeconomic status (SES), unemployed Black woman, who received CC in Brazil. The model is based on the life design paradigm, the psychology of working theory (PWT), and Latin American critical theories, and its two basic principles are intercultural dialogue and hybridism. It is grounded on four basic theoretical underpinnings (relational ontology, career as a working life project and working life trajectory, narratability, and the counselee as a subject of rights) and seven basic technical underpinnings (counsellor acting as an intermediary, focus on the process, counselling as a successive process of coconstruction, diatopical hermeneutics, discursive validation, critical consciousness, and communitarian strategies). The limitations and potentialities of the proposed CC model are also discussed.