La ficción como categoría para aproximarnos al quehacer del trabajo social

Abstract

The academic community’s contribution to the social work profession is manifested in the recovery, enunciation, and analysis of every day practices. This work, conducted as part of a master’s thesis in Social Work at UNAM, distances itself from imposing a “should be” of the profession and bases its methodology on the categories of fiction and invention to account for what is produced, displaced, and invented in the daily lives of social work professionals working in high schools in Mexico City. As a result, it analyzes working conditions, interactions with other educational actors, and the tactics and strategies employed by social workers in schools. The relationship between academic discourse, the norms of the Ministry of Public Education, and common practices is questioned, seeking to understand how social workers invent and reinvent their work. The fieldwork focused on in-depth interviews with colleagues, leading to understand the following categories in the findings: colleagues’ positions as subjects in their school communities, the displacement of their daily practices in the face of institutional conditions and personal stances, the shifts and movements in their discourses, the sense of doing social work in the hagiographic and mystical, and finally, the use of tactics and strategies to invent their daily work. The text also addresses the discourses and perceptions of social workers about the social reality of youth, including topics such as violence, drugs, and exclusion. It highlights the strategies used by social workers to address conflictive situations and support students, as well as tensions between institutional norms and everyday practices. Finally, it acknowledges that in the fiction of school social work, not only the everyday is reflected, but also the possibility of intervention and change for our profession.