Trabajo Social

This special issue of the journal Trabajo Social celebrates the forty-year anniversary of the Social Work Department at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. To understand its history, we reviewed analyses and interpretations related to its development. We considered them from a pluralist perspective, recognizing that differences, along with the controversies surrounding its journey, enhance our perspectives and keep us open-minded. Let’s take a look.

Given the conditions of public higher education, the School of Social Work at the Colegio Mayor de Cultura Femenina de Cundinamarca received guidance between 1962 and 1965 from the University’s School of Sociology when it was affiliated with that institution. Internal circumstances within both universities influenced the evolution of Social Work. For instance, the School of Social Work was established in 1946 and underwent reform more than twice (García Bustamante, 2003). Apparently, it was characterized by its closed-off views and limited exchanges, the exclusion of men from admission, and its paramedical and paralegal instruction within an institution that did not resemble a university (Chávez de Santacruz, 2006).

To resolve academic and administrative conflicts, the Social Work faculty took actions over more than twenty years to establish the Social Work Department, amidst various traditional and reconceptualizing movements in Social Work across Latin America. These movements, guided by both conventional and alternative approaches, advocated for maintaining, reforming, or transforming established systems at the continental, national, regional, and local levels.

In 1985, amidst neo-modernizing currents, with neo-positivist and neo-functionalist emphases, the University Higher Council issued Agreement 75 of August 28 of that year, “Creating the SOCIAL WORK Department within the School of Human Sciences of Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá Campus).”

This special issue of the journal Trabajo Social features fourteen articles, five reviews, three interviews, a historical document, and a series of events that were published in Spanish by faculty members of the Social Work Department between 2005 and 2026 in the same journal. The dossier groups the articles into four thematic areas related to our current research and intervention strands.