Firewalls are clear divisions between border policing and the provision of basic social rights. They have a dual character: to ensure that no information collected with the purpose of safeguarding basic social rights should be shared for immigration control purposes; and that migrants should not be subject to immigration control when being present at, or in the vicinity, of religious, private and public institutions upholding and providing social rights. This article suggests a normative argument for ‘firewalls’ in the context of social work and develops the concept theoretically as a principle practised and negotiated at different scales.
Professional social work was established and expanded in a historical moment marked by intense nation-building; it was organized along and in parallel with other welfare state services which functioned to strengthen the nation-state. Today social work is at practice in a society marked by intensified globalisation; social needs and social problems that social workers are confronted with in their professional practice are sometimes transnational in their dynamics and cannot adequately be understood when limited to a local or national context. Drawing on insights from the transnational perspective, this article identifies challenges and ways ahead in the development of social work practice and theory with relevance for the globalised society. It argues that the transnational perspective can contribute to the dissolving of binaries between both 'here ' and 'there', and 'us' and 'them' in social work, and pave the way for approaching social problems from a relational viewpoint beyond 'given' territorial and ethnocultural lenses.
This article considers competing conceptions of knowledge within Swedish social work education often presented as incompatibles. However, in this article we find commonalities and differences in these conceptions of knowledge. The analysis relies on written materials about Swedish social work education and concentrates on three developmental phases in time: the establishment of the first social worker programme, the establishment of social work as an academic discipline and the current situation. It shows how competing conceptions of knowledge try to respond to societal and academic demands in different ways.
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