Helping professions address the growing number of social problems which have emerged, along with contextual changes in Russian society, culture and state social policy. Social work only emerged in Russia in  and it still lacks recognition by public opinion and by other caring professions. This paper addresses the current development of the social work profession in Russia, considers its context and reviews the main issues affecting processes within social work practice and education. Many social work agencies are in search of new forms of organization and are trying to develop new philosophies of service, in order to build positive relations with communities. However, given the  years of the Soviet era when social protection was highly centralized and bureaucratized, the organizational cultures of the new social services sometimes reproduce old patterns of bureaucracy, especially where employees lack professional education. The reflective practitioner type of professionalism is here argued to be more appropriate for social workers in today's Russia. The paper includes an analysis of interviews with social workers and administrators in a large Russian city and considers the results of an ethnographic study of social services in the same city. Social Work in Russia in the s: Issues of Professionalization Functional social work and dysfunctional social environmentThere are different approaches to the concept of professionalization (see Reeser and Epstein ; Larson ; Jones and Joss ). Some sociologists have described it as a positive and progressive force which promotes "general S P  A  0144-5596

Coming at the cusp of 20 years of social work training in Russia, this article analyses why education in universities is still so disconnected from the field of social work practice. Our attention focuses on institutional dynamics that shape the national regulation of social work education, limited practice content in curricula and the mixed impact of international co-operation. The research highlights that achieving broad agreement on the need for practice skills, service user prioritization and a strong values base must be the key focus when developing training in contexts where social work is relatively new.

This paper explores the silence surrounding disabled people's sexuality in contemporary, postsocialist Bulgaria. The related desexualisation of disabled people is regarded as an instance of disablism that is sustained through medicalisation, patriarchal stereotypes and negative understandings of the bodily difference of 'impairment'. The analysis draws on disability studies and phenomenology in order to elicit the workings of these mechanisms in everyday discourse as represented by an autobiographical essay and an internet discussion. A number of strategies for challenging disablist desexualisation are also highlighted whose point of departure is breaking the silence on the topic of disabled people's sexuality.2 BackgroundSince the fall of the state socialist regime in 1989, Bulgaria has experienced a turbulent 'transition' from centrally planned towards free market economy and from one-party rule towards parliamentary democracy. This transformation has been accompanied by a number of significant social and cultural changes, but also by a number of continuities. The new order ostensibly undermined all kinds of boundariesnational, ideological, cultural.Travelling abroad became easier and people gained unprecedented access to previously scarce or explicitly forbidden cultural resources, a process that has been greatly enhanced by the internet since the mid-1990s. Neverthelessor probably precisely as a reaction to such disorienting opennessnegative attitudes towards difference along major sociocultural axes like ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and disability have remained relatively stable. Public discussion on such issues was largely silenced during the state socialist period, when the problems of difference were expected to automatically wither away with the abolition of class exploitation. They did not disappear, 1 but neither did they dissolve with the development of the free market and parliamentary democracy after 1989.The results of recent sociological studies strongly suggest that 'at the moment in Bulgaria (and to a different but approximating degree in all postsocialist countries) many real problems exist in relation to the perception and approach towards difference' (Tomova, 2009: 120).

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