Sociologies (Oct 2020)
Connaître le travail social, connaître avec le travail social
Abstract
How can the legitimacy of social work be reconsidered in the light of the activating social Welfare State and its injunction to involve beneficiaries? Professionnality has been rethought since the notion of Deweyan practical inquiry as a process of knowledge building. The professional intervention involves a concrete engagement in relationships with an environment that responds to actions addressed to it, and the construction of expertise operates with the beneficiaries. Anchoring the recognition of social work in the skills and in what is invented in them, by linking them to the practical knowledge that is built up since the commitment to action, avoids approaching know-how as a whole already constituted, linked to knowledge to be applied. The aim is to denaturalize the know-how by recognizing that the experiments carried out by professionals alongside the beneficiaries open up possibilities. A completely different perspective then emerges: knowledge has a public scope by encouraging practices to become nurtured by new issues of a democratic nature.
