Social Work for Peace and Transnational Solidarity: Sometimes a Reality, Sometimes a Distant Dream
Darja Zaviršek
Short description:
The atmosphere of polarisation and militarisation in which we currently live also creates divisions in social work. The existence of competing truths within the discipline, verbal or silent conflicts as students and social work academics often remember and commemorate different events and even victims, calls for social work war and peace studies. It is suggested that if militarism needs a system of war, social work needs a system of peace and connectedness. To this end, the new questions and ethical dilemmas call for new social work responses, not only concerning forced migration and deportation but also about ethical stances on conscription and gender-based violence in war. We may find some illuminating answers in the work of early social work pioneers and some examples of transnational solidarity, past and present.
Hard-to-reach - reasons of being unconnected and necessity of embedding work
Lisa Große and Karsten Giertz
Short description:
Abstract: Clinical Social Work is often characterised by clients with multiple problems (so-called hard-to-reach clients). Clients have made often hurtful interpersonal experiences. Clinical Social Work therefore focuses on professional relationship and embedding work as part of an understanding approach in order to identify needs and implement appropriate interventions on this basis. The close connection between behaviour and relationships in the genesis and treatment of problems also requires an examination of structural and social barriers. The lecture provides an insight into the current debate on hard-to-reach clients, uses empirical findings and theoretical discussions to show the necessity and procedure of professional relationship and network design and at the same time addresses the necessary framework conditions at the institutional and structural level.
Relation to the main topic: As Social Workers, Karsten Giertz and Lisa Große have repeatedly worked with (mainly mentally ill) people who have lost their social embedding for various reasons: They were and are virtually isolated, have acquired mistrust towards support persons and at the same time are dependent on social support due to their complex needs. Theoretical and empirical studies in recent years have shown that hurtful interpersonal experiences can lead to a wide range of target groups (young people with challenging behaviour, homeless people, refugees, people with mental illness) withdrawing from social connectedness in order to protect themselves. In order to meet this need, specific considerations are therefore required (description of the phenomenon of hard-to-reach, professional relationship work, psychosocial diagnostics, etc.), which we constantly discuss within the framework of Clinical Social Work with specialised colleagues in publications, work contexts and further training.
The normal common sense - the normalisation of a politics of emotions
Ruth Wodak
Short description:
Crises cause and trigger fear, panic, uncertainty, and insecurity. Crises polarize, frequently insurmountable (ideological) positions face each other. Currently, in 2024, we are confronted with a polycrisis (@ Adam Tooze). Therefore, dealing with continuous huge uncertainty challenges everyone involved, in the European Union and beyond. Everyone expects instructions, planning, explanations and ultimately security, i.e., adequate crisis communication, crisis management, and – more specifically – plausible and adequate solutions. (Wodak & Rheindorf 2022; Krzyżanowski, Wodak, Bradby, et al. 2023; Wodak 2024)
In fact, however, we are frequently confronted with scaremongering, simplifications, a range of different legitimation strategies and fallacies, victim and hero narratives, and a search for scapegoats.
In such exceptional (crises) times, self-interests and appeals to common-sense – after initial expressions of solidarity – are often placed before community interests, national or even local interests, before European or international treaties, and the validity of human rights is increasingly challenged.
In this lecture, I will discuss some salient legitimation strategies linked to a range of argumentation schemes, in respect to recently proposed “common sense” solutions (f. ex., to European migration and asylum policies, and to a “normal nationalism”), while analyzing EU policy papers, speeches of, and interviews with, politicians and the subsequent media reporting. It seems as if disinformation is dominating and appeals to common-sense (“the arrogance of ignorance” @ Wodak 2021, 2022) and to negative emotions are overriding fact-based reasoning.
