The challenges of social work public incidence
The Network of Schools of Social Work of Chilean Universities CRUCH calls for the IV International Congress of Social Work to take place in the city of Valparaiso, Chile, projecting itself toward Latin America and other regions of the world. The congress aims to develop professional and disciplinary discussions about social work in the current context of the crisis crossed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exposed the fragility and precarity of life under neoliberal states and reduced rights. This precarity expresses in multiple spaces impacting diverse social groups from different latitudes. Among the most impacted, we found those countries from the global south but also those from the global north, which already, during the 2008 crisis, experienced an exacerbation of the phenomena of inequality, poverty and exclusion in territories that were seen as characteristic of the “third world”.
The IV congress poses the challenge of discussing and defining proposals from social work in the light of the current scenario and its prospects. Particularly important will be to give special attention to resistance expressions, the emergence of new actors, and social, political, and cultural dynamics, pointing to the public incidence of our profession on social transformations.
Under these critical circumstances, we can see how diverse conflicts and expressions of the crisis have sharpened due to the global problem of the COVID-19 pandemic; exposing a set of exclusions and inequalities that intersect across the global everyday experience of citizens in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as in other regions of the world.
Therefore, the starting point of the congress and its continuity is precisely the generalised crisis that has developed during the last years at local, regional, and global levels, impacting critically on the political, social, and economic spheres, as has been possible to witness. Impacts indeed that can be observed when looking at the levels of job insecurity and work precarity; the living conditions of vast social groups subjected to discrimination and infringement of their rights, as is the case of children, young people, women, migrants, indigenous and tribal peoples, subcontracted workers, environmental activists, LGBTQI+ groups and communities from territories impacted by environmental damage; among the diversity of actors and subjects that have experienced segregation, exclusion and inequality.
In the face of the above conflicts, it has been possible to notice the diversity through which the groups and organisations of civil society deal with the crisis and conflicts based on organisational and solidarity practices, which contrasts with the weak answer of the state. From the perspective of social work, we found how the professional practice has been doubly challenged when thinking, on the one hand, in the scope of the professional action; but on the other hand, and its limited public incidence when having to implement residual policies which damage not only diverse social groups but also the definition of the profession as such. Nevertheless, this contraction can be faced from different positions. On one side, there is the unrest produced by the working conditions of social workers; the reduction of professional practice under social programmes of control and disciplinary orientation, which limit the opportunities for change and answer in the face of the demands and big challenges of the social dynamic. On the other side, we found the unfolding and empowerment of diverse organisations in articulation with professional groups that generate creative and innovative experiences through which they express their compromise with excluded sectors of society while critically reviewing the definition of social work’s professional action and practice. We value the multiplication of surviving collective strategies, the diverse forms that these ways of resistance take, and those conflicts that interpellate local and global context in collective terms. This congress proposes to discuss and distinguish conflicts, projects, and political bets of common life, considering the democratic limitations that sharpen in contexts of crisis and alert us about the exclusion of citizen participation and authoritarianism through dissimilar and sophisticated ways.
The congress seeks to propitiate a space for discussing the above phenomena and their implications in the task of professional and disciplinary training, considering the demand for social justice in the world and taking into account the democratising challenge in Latin America.
Social movements have warned about such issues from different sectorial, territorial, or global demands, considering movements like “Black Lives Matter” in the USA, but also the “MeToo” movement and the “Feminist Strike” that expanded towards different latitudes. Likewise, we observe in Latin America the determined action of indigenous and de-colonial movements along with educational and environmental movements, including also the 2018 Feminist May, which expanded throughout the continent, and also the popular revolts in Chile and Colombia from 2019 onwards. Processes that together seem to show the loss of legitimacy of the classical institutions of liberal democracy in the face of the inability and minimal will of states regarding their duties towards citizens to deal with the series of global crises (1997, 2008, 2020). On the contrary, it has been possible to witness how states have insisted on applying neoliberal policies with monetary and financial traits. These policies have developed hand in hand with colonial, extractivist, patriarchal and racist paradigms, which exclude life and peoples. Therefore, the current crisis also expresses a crisis of democracy.
Based on the above questionings, we call for an interchange organised around five axes of discussion – each one with its sub-axes -in order to approach topics like critical perspectives on social work; professional training in the light of public incidence, emphasizing the link between research and intervention; the challenges of knowledge production; the development of articulating views about the micro and macrosocial, contributing to the production of knowledge from the singular position of this profession and discipline.
Moreover, the IV congress poses the challenge of discussing and defining proposals from social work in the light of the current scenario and its prospects. Particularly important will be to give special attention to resistance expressions, the emergence of new actors, and social, political, and cultural dynamics, pointing to the public incidence of our profession on social transformations. All welcome!