The Social
The aim of the conference is to reassert,
or even reinstate, social work. However,
it is also about the social re-emerging
or even breaking through as real action.
After decades of a diminished social, a conjuncture that has privileged
the economic and neglected and
downgraded the social dimension as the basis of our existence, there is an
urgent need for the breakthrough of a brand-new social, analogous to the one superseding classic liberalism at the
end of the 19th century in the Global North.
Social work has, not only to be a part of
this breakthrough, strengthened by this emergence and enabled to survive as an essential
feature of society, but also needs to play an active role in bringing it to
fruition.
Radical Social Transformations
We are living, in Polanyi’s terms, through yet another great transformation: a radical transformation. The
transformation of the future will be radical anyway, whether we give up and merely
observe the collapse of civilisation, or if we try to bring about a more
socially just world, based on the common good and on living together – actively
preserving that which is good, including the natural world and the eco-system,
and radically changing what does not work. Globalisation, digitalisation, forced
migration, demographic change, a changing division of labour, etc., have all exposed
us to unprecedented, and sometimes unseen risks, but has also created numerous
new opportunities in terms of communication, mobility, diversity, productive
capacity and culture. Yet we crave for security (both social and physical) and fear violence, which keeps
emerging in new forms and with a growing intensity.
The natural and political dimensions
of the catastrophe merge into one through
global warming, caused by fossil capitalism and the need to turn natural
resources into profit. They are epitomised by migration, including migration
forced as a result of conflicts, climate change and/or economic misery; fear exploited
by authoritarianism (containing and fuelled by many kinds of religious fundamentalisms
of many kinds , growing and massive inequality created by neo-liberal regimes, and
the removal of liberties and freedom (gentrification for the rich – immobility
for the poor), growing exploitation through new forms of work in the so-called gig
economy, an expanded precariat, with deep psychological and social consequences,
making human existence precarious indeed.
Yet, there have been important developments towards an inclusive
society. The rights of people with disabilities and children have been clearly
stated, enshrined in global Conventions, and, albeit with some hiccups,
implemented on the ground, although not fully. Deinstitutionalisation and long-term care, have been introduced,
not without obstacles, contributing to a re-evaluation
of old age (Old is good), madness, handicap, childhood, and disability. More
and more new social movements keep arising desiring a better, more dignified,
life connecting the grassroots and global scales. New, alternative, forms of
economic relations are being developed and a new kind of urban revolution seems
to be imminent, not least in the Fearless cities movements. Although the age of
austerity seems to be waning, what post-austerity will look like is still under
construction. Trades unions, including trades’ unions of social workers, need
to adapt to new forms of work and to advocate for measures to benefit the whole
of society.
Wisdom of Social Work Interfaces
To steer the transformation toward human
solutions, practical wisdom is
needed. The role of social work is to do just that; even more, it has to
safeguard and promote the local or indigenous
knowledge of minorities so it withstands and has impact on the global rule of
abstract schemes. Ordinary everyday life – the Life World - should become the
basic and pragmatic criterion of policy change and mutations – assuring the
sovereignty of people (over the abstract schemes).
Besides the unalienable mandate of social work
to provide the everyday, users’ perspective on life and the world, the strength
of social work lies in bringing together unseemly combinations
of knowledge and logic of action. The major sources of social work action
syntheses are ethics, organisation and politics. There is the need to know
what is the right thing to do, how to organise the transition and where to get the
power to do it. Social work’s ethics of Inclusion and imperative of
non-exclusion provide the humanist synthesis of the broken dialectics of
Reason/ Unreason. To follow its ethical imperatives, forms of self-management (rather than social
service management) should be sought. Social work engagement in politics needs to stem from popular activism and a politics of intersectionality and emotions.
The practical
power of social work lies in its transversal, inter-disciplinary, approach and
inter-sectoral position. The Welfare (State) needs to
be reinvented on the grounds of a critical evaluation of the post-socialist
(with post-austerity in mind) syntheses (Balkan, East, Third World) and social
work’s role in the bottom-up construction of social policies asserted. Social
work has to create productive links with the human disciplines and sectors. In education,
social work can contribute to learning in action and provide the solutions to schooling
problems (bullying, teacher protection). In health,
being constantly in relation with social work, it can bestow the importance of the
user’s perspective, involvement and participation leading to a holistic
approach to health and well-being. In combining legal frame and social process (in the law and administration), it
can counter the debasing practices and bureaucratisation with empowering and
advocacy practices.
Practical Utopias (Challenges for Social Work)
Social work is a practical, everyday Utopia
(Basaglia), it is always about becoming, searching for a better place, more
human and more social. It has to have a (utopian) goal of desire – be it about
changing for the better or conserving what is good. In its history, social work
has developed many productive Tools, which need to be re-strengthened and
re-loaded, with new alternatives sought and built. With classic tools and
stories joined by new ones and governed by the notion of users’ emancipation.
Comparative social work should enable the transfer and translation of
good practices, not only across diverse national and local contexts, but also over
the life cycle in working with children and youth, the old, families facing multiple challenges, with
people with diverse labels – poverty, delinquency, disability, heavy mental health
concerns and so on. An intersectional approach should focus on the
inter-relationship between gender, age, ‘race’, class, sexuality, and
disability. Specific attention needs to be focused on providing appropriate
support for LGBTQ emancipation and to the attitudes to refugees and migrants
and the role of social work in this area.
Deinstitutionalisation, which has in recent
decade become a global platform, needs an overview and a context, an appreciation
of its achievements, obstacles and traps and a vision how to handle it as a
technology and an ethical imperative. Simultaneously it has to be sensitised
and polemic to the remaining elements of oppression, detention, constraint,
punishment and even torture in the care system. Long-term care, which aspires
to become a universal provision is a challenge per se and needs to be consistently and radically implemented as
such – to connect with other types of existing provision in order to become universally
available. Attention needs to be brought on instances of increased power of
service users (e.g. shared decision-making, co-managers, co-trainers and
co-researchers)
There are new areas social work is entering
into (such as green social work) and new means of performing social work (such
as through social media and new technologies).
There is a constant struggle between social work and fragmentising
governance and management. In the past decades social work has been under
attack of ‘proceduralism’ and projectualism/projectisation, even if social
work has invented practical solutions to resolve the formal contradictions
between protection (care) and freedom.
Increasing atomisation, individualisation
and impotence of a practice based solely on individual social work, calls for a
Reinvention of community social work and action (also to challenge the rise of
religious fundamentalisms and authoritarian neoliberalisms).
The challenge for social work today is to build a vision that will
guide us through new areas, foster and preserve freedoms based on (social)
security, dealing simultaneously and comprehensively with diverse adversity and
enabling people (both professionals and users) to address life issues in a
transversal and intersectional manner; enabling people to live together with
minimum exclusion and maximum availability of support for personal and communal
projects, without fearing the consequences of oppression and without becoming
prey to authoritarian power.
[1] This draft of the manifesto is based on the ideas of the conference
content brainstormed by the programme committee and compiled by Vito Flaker. It
is 'a draft' – subject to comments, suggestions and additions by the
participants before and during the conference The Breakthrough of the Social: Practical Utopias, Wisdom and Radical
Transformations – Social Work @IUC: Lessons Learned and Future Challenges. The
conference will be held at Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, 2–6 September
2019, organised by the IUC ‘School of Social Work Theory and Practice’.
