Social workers in the Revolution: Social work’s political agency and intervention in the Portuguese democratic transition (1974–1976)

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro G Silva
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Democratic Transition ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
The Revolution

A period of profound social and political changes, the democratic transition that followed the 1974 military coup in Portugal had an enormous impact on social work. The Revolution set the ideal conditions for social workers to perform alternative forms of intervention, moving away from the assistance-focused practices characteristic of the former authoritarian rule. Incited by the new progressive political agenda, social workers stood at the forefront of the Revolution, working alongside grass-roots mobilisations and experimental participative projects, overtly assuming political stands. This article analyses the agency of social workers in the various political and social fronts during the democratic transition.

scholarly journals Is Indonesia a Model for the Arab Spring? Islam, Democracy, and Diplomacy

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
James B. Hoesterey
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Transition ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
Asian Financial Crisis ◽  
Hillary Clinton ◽  
Economic Stability ◽  
Ideal Model ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
East Indies ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The Ideal

As protestors filled Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011, Western diplomats, academics, and political pundits were searching for the best political analogy for the promise—and problems—of the Arab Uprising. Whereas neoconservative skeptics fretted that Egypt and Tunisia might go the way of post-revolutionary Iran, Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright praised Indonesia’s democratization as the ideal model for the Arab Spring. During her 2009 visit to Indonesia, Clinton proclaimed: “If you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity, and women’s rights can coexist, go to Indonesia.” Certainly Indonesia of May 1998 is not Egypt of January 2011, yet some comparisons are instructive. Still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, middle class Indonesians were fed up with corruption, cronyism, and a military that operated with impunity. On 21 May 1998 Soeharto resigned after three decades of authoritarian rule. Despite fits of starts and stops, the democratic transition has brought political and economic stability. Whereas academics and pundits have debated the merits of the Indonesia model for democratic transition, in this article I consider how the notion of Indonesia as a model for the Arab Spring has reconfigured transnational Muslim networks and recalibrated claims to authority and authenticity within the global umma.An increasing body of scholarship devoted to global Muslim networks offers important insights into the longue durée of merchant traders and itinerant preachers connecting the Middle East with Southeast Asia. In his critique of Benedict Anderson’s famous explanation of “imagined communities” as the result of print capitalism within national borders, historian Michael Laffan argued that Indonesian nationalism had important roots in global Muslim networks connecting the Dutch East Indies with Cairo’s famous al-Azhar University.

scholarly journals Collective endeavours: finding community, love and hope

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret S. Malloch
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Community Support ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Professional Resources

Strains on professional resources and complex experiences of isolation and despair have taken their toll on communities, adding to the challenges for social workers and social work as a profession. In a context of austerity and locational stress, communities are increasingly relied upon to enhance or, indeed, replace the need for state intervention. However, grass-roots and mutual aid collectives have the potential for both community support and resistance. Using original qualitative data, this article explores how some groups based in Scotland’s most deprived locales provide collective and mutual aid, and, in doing so, attempt to address some of the challenges of modern life (such as overcoming addiction, isolation and mental anguish). Importantly, this article revives and develops Erich Fromm’s discourse on the importance of ‘love’ and Marx’s concept of ‘spiritual emancipation’ to explore the potential for transforming individual experiences into collective resistance.

scholarly journals The Discursive Struggles of the Client–Worker Relationship in the Social Services

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Nykänen ◽  
Leena Mikkola
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Interpersonal Relationship ◽  
Relational Dialectics ◽  
Relational Dialectics Theory ◽  
Service Workers ◽  
Relational Frames ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Ideal

This study examines how disability service workers identify the discourses of the client-worker relationships. We studied the clientworker relationship from the perspective of the relational dialectics theory with a focus on relational contradictions and the meanings created within discursive struggles. We analyzed the interview data from 22 social workers using contrapuntal analysis. According to the social workers’ perceptions, two discursive struggles exist in client-worker relationships: i) the struggle of integration, consisting of the contradiction of the ideal and the real and the contradiction of closeness and reservedness and ii) the struggle of certainty, consisting of the contradiction of predictability and novelty and the contradiction of openness and closedness. These struggles and contradictions arranges on the societal and relational frames to fully depict the nature of social work. Overall, our analysis shows that the client-worker relationship is both bound to the norms of a professional and a close interpersonal relationship, making its study particularly interesting.

scholarly journals HJEMLIGHED SOM VELFÆRDSPARADOKS: Om iscenesat autenticitet i døgninstitutioner for anbragte børn

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Højlund
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Children’S Homes ◽  
The Ideal

The article is built upon a fi eldwork in Danish children’s homes which analyses what it means to social workers and children to be a homey institution. The ideal of hominess is presented as a paradoxical idea producing several contradictions and dilemmas in the everyday life of the institution. The article presents the historical background for this problem, with a focus on the ideal of authenticity both as a product of, and a counter-strategy to, modernity. Keywords: Home, hominess, social work, children’s homes.  

scholarly journals PREVENT, safeguarding and the common-sensing of social work in the United Kingdom

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-28
Author(s):  
David McKendrick ◽  
Jo Finch
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Counter Terrorism ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Uk

INTRODUCTION: The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act (2015) passed in the United Kingdom (UK) made it mandatory for social workers, as well as a wide range of caring professionals, to work within the PREVENT policy, originally introduced in 2002, as one strand of the UK’s overall counter-terrorism policy.METHOD: The paper offers a theoretical account of how complex issues, like terrorism, that understandably impact on the safety and security of countries, are reduced to a series of assertions, claims and panics that centre on the notion of common sense.IMPLICATIONS: We theorise the concept of common sense and argue that such rhetorical devices have become part of the narrative that surrounds the PREVENT agenda in the UK, which co-opts social workers (and other public servants) into an increasingly securitised environment within the state. In other words, the appeal to common sense stifles critical debate, makes it hard to raise concerns and positions debates in a binary manner. We use the example of how there has been a decisive linking of traditional safeguarding social work practice with counter-terrorism activity.CONCLUSIONS: We posit that linkages such as this serve to advance a more closed society, resulting in a “chilling” of free speech, an increase in surveillance and the unchecked advancement of a neoliberal political agenda which promotes economic considerations over issues of social justice. This we argue, has implications for not only the UK, but for other countries where social workers are increasingly being tasked with counter-terrorism activities.

scholarly journals The radical turn of Portuguese social work during the democratic transition (1974–76)

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Gabriel Silva
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Grass Roots Initiatives ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Radical Intervention

The transition to democracy in Portugal in the 1970s provides the socio-historical background for this article. It focuses on the period of 1974–76, known as the revolutionary phase, when a series of progressive political programmes, forms of direct democracy, collective mobilisation and widespread grass-roots initiatives emerged in the aftermath of the dictatorial regime. The experiences of Portuguese social workers in the aforementioned revolutionary vanguards will be compared and interpreted by using the radical social work approaches that sprang up in the UK and US at the time. Ten in-depth interviews with social workers involved in radical intervention during the revolutionary phase will be compared to the key tenets of the radical social work literature of the 1970s.

THEORETICAL BASIS OF PROBLEM OF SHAPING CREATIVE COMPETENCE IN FUTURE SOCIAL WORKERS FOR WORK WITH GIFTED CHILDREN

2019 ◽  
pp. 34-45
Author(s):  
Halyna Mykhailyshyn ◽  
Oksana Protas
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Gifted Children ◽  
Educational Establishment ◽  
Higher Educational

For effective forming of creative competence in future social work experts, we suggested using the creative approach to organization of educational process in a higher educational establishment, using the potential of different disciplines in the process of professional training. We clarified the main aspects of shaping of creative competence in future social workers in classroom and outside classroom, as well as main forms of the methodology of such training. The use of the mentioned approaches will give an opportunity to shape creative competence in future social workers for work with gifted children.

Constituent Power

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nimer Sultany
Keyword(s):  
Political Order ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Constitution Making ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter argues that scholarly debates about constituent power presuppose a distinction between constituent power and constitutional form that is neither theoretically compelling nor practically illuminating. In contrast to constitutionalists, it argues that constituent power is inexhaustible, the revolution not being reducible to an event and thus constitution-making fails to terminate constituent power. In contrast to populists, it argues that constituent power does not operate in a constitutional vacuum because the judiciary imposes constitutional continuity through unwritten constitutional principles. The judiciary also polices will formation during revolutionary upheaval, as reflected in Egyptian and Tunisian judicial rulings and legal debates relating to the formation and functioning of constituent assemblies. Finally, the overlap between constitutive and legislative functions in the practice of constituent assemblies, and the deflation of the constituent power’s political agency are inconsistent with theories that present constituent power as an unbounded political agency that establishes a new political order.

Facilitating Injustice

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoosun Park
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Public Sector ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Mass Removal ◽  
Professional Obligations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Private Charity ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
Major Shift

Social workers were involved in all aspects of the removal, incarceration, and resettlement of the Nikkei, a history that has been forgotten by social work. This study is an effort to address this lacuna. Social work equivocated. While it did not fully endorse mass removal and incarceration, neither did it protest, oppose, or explicitly critique government actions. The past should not be judged by today’s standards; the actions and motivations described here occurred in a period rife with fear and propaganda. Undergoing a major shift from its private charity roots into its public sector future, social work bounded with the rest of society into “a patriotic fervor.” While policies of a government at war, intractable bureaucratic structures, tangled political alliances, and complex professional obligations all may have mandated compliance, it is, nevertheless, difficult to deny that social work and social workers were also willing participants in the events, informed about and aware of the implications of that compliance. In social work’s unwillingness to take a resolute stand against removal and incarceration, the well-intentioned profession, doing its conscious best to do good, enforced the existing social order and did its level best to keep the Nikkei from disrupting it.

Islamically Framed Mobilization in Tunisia: Ansar al-Sharia in the Aftermath of the Arab Uprisings

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frédéric Volpi
Keyword(s):  
Social Activism ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
State Control ◽  
Party Discipline ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
Religious Competition ◽  
System P ◽  
Tunisian Revolution

This chapter addresses two main aspects of Islamically framed social mobilization, with a particular focus on the protest dynamics that took place in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings in Tunisia. It outlines the evolution of such mobilizations over time, as state control of the political and religious field changed and as intra-religious competition was reshaped. In Tunisia, while institutionalized political Islam was mainly channeled through the pragmatic approach developed by Ennahda, Islamically framed social activism was nonetheless significantly influenced by the Salafi network centering on Ansar al-Sharia. The attractiveness of the Salafi discourse, particularly among young and disenfranchised protesters in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution, was that it offered immediate opportunities for action and for social recognition. Ultimately, Ansar al-Sharia failed to institutionalize their influence and to shape the patterns of democratization in the country, primarily because they could not agree between themselves on a political agenda, and because they could not impose party discipline on their youthful new supporters. The rapid grass-roots mobilization that underpinned the rise of the Salafi movement created a situation of hubris and was quickly followed by demobilization when the state used the security apparatus to repress activities that were seen as a threat to the newly established democratic system.

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