Trabajo Social

Volumen 27, número 2. Historias y epistemologías del Trabajo Social - Closing of call

Disciplinary studies are interrogated through complex and decolonial thoughts, as they section the produced knowledge by fulfilling requirements of "validity, rationality, objectivity, verifiability, systematicity, and precision." For instance, in complex thought, modern science has fragmented life and, consequently, the new science implies a "complex unity" trans or undisciplinary. In turn, in decolonial thought, social sciences must be built with a trans or undisciplinary character, situating disciplinary questions as part of the dialogues to be promoted in vast fields of knowledge.

However, explicitly stating disciplinary reflections of Social Work is a current issue, just as visualizing inter, trans, and undisciplinary deliberations is a key theme. Hence, we invite you to present research on historical and epistemological issues of Social Work, highlighting its accumulations of notions, postulates, agendas, experiences, and projections, to the same extent as its accumulations of preferences, trends, controversies, tensions, complementarities, and concurrences.

Since the late 19th century, in the Western world, Social Work reveals becomings in which its academic community, through situated research and interventions, materializes references that emerge, mutate, underlie, prevail, and coexist in its own fields and, likewise, in other disciplines. This is to contribute to sustaining, reforming, or transforming the contexts in which broad sectors of society are located.

Considering these disciplinary webs, it is fundamental to make visible participations that allow clarifying contexts, horizons, guidelines, trajectories, results, and learnings of said Social Work. So, we hope to receive contributions that respond to: What social, environmental, economic, political, and cultural features have conditioned the deployments of Social Work? How have the knowledge management cycles of Social Work been activated in their spatialities and temporalities? What are the characteristics of the production, circulation, and application of knowledge of Social Work in specific times and spaces? What attributes does the relationship between research, intervention, and transformation in the developments of Social Work evidence? Does it reflect conflicts? If so, of what kinds? How have they been resolved? What lessons, achievements, and challenges does this relationship leave?

Now, in this issue of the journal, we give specific attention to research on intervention since, in Social Work, the latter has been a component of social legitimacy and, with more obstacles, academic legitimacy.

It is worth recalling that, at the beginning of the 20th century, these legitimacies began to take root in a sort of "common base knowledge" based on the pioneering works of Social Work. For example, Mary Richmond in Social Diagnosis (1917) explained to practitioners the methods that were useful to their predecessors. In this book, she established the relevance of drawing inspiration from professional practice to understand it, criticizing the immediacy of practice and the excessive emphasis placed on the scientific method, by emerging social sciences, as a parameter of its reliability. That is, Richmond rejected the immediate inspiration of the situations addressed as well as strict compliance with norms and theoretical formulas as exclusive guides. Since then, research on intervention is assumed as fertile ground in the construction and extension of knowledge concerning Social Work.

Nevertheless, the pluralism that encourages this issue of Social Work alludes to the bioethical, political, ontological, epistemological, contextual, theoretical, or methodological interconnections of social workers with social, state, and commercial actors in diffuse or complicated conditions, as well as overflowing with options. Therefore, we aspire to gather contributions to configure a historical and epistemological mosaic of Social Work that links us and, at the same time, recognizes our differences.

Maira Judith Contreras Santos

Director-Editor