SOCIAL WORK: training, professional work, and modern theoretical trends

Abstract

This issue of Katalysis, with the theme Social Work: training, professional work, and modern theoretical trends, is released in a particularly troubled time in Brazil. It is a moment where the incumbent government adopts a 'policy of death,' or a 'necropolicy' that explicitly determines who can or cannot live. It is crucial to resist to this kind of force, fighting it daily on the 'shop floor' or in academic spaces, by producing information that is socially acknowledged from the emancipation and liberation of those who live by selling their workforce. Societal transformations, at this moment of capitalist accumulation, demand radicality to guarantee a meaningful life, which is the outcome of collective construction of another world, where there are no longer exploiters or the exploited. The presentism and obscurantism approaches, as expressions of modern trends, find in this issue of Katalysis a blunt and concrete response. The journal's theme discusses the worsening of the process of dehumanization and life degradation, reflecting on how societal transformations, both in form and content, affect social workers' training and professional work. Based on a conception of profession that does not dissociate work and vocational training, the Brazilian social work is a consolidated field of knowledge production. The articles published in this issue assert for investment and strengthening of research in the field, as well as reaffirming the ethical-political and theoreticalmethodological direction, committed to the break with conservatism and the demystification of social relations that engender the current pattern of capitalist accumulation. The ontology of social being based on Marx's work and tradition is the guiding thread that unifies and gives robustness to the authors' intellectual contribution. This issue is organized in three sessions, presenting fifteen articles and a review, produced by both young and experienced researchers, women and men from different regions of the country, with texts written in Portuguese and one in Spanish. Individually and as a group, these articles show a commitment to science, facing the daily immediacy and the contempt for a critical reason. The first article in the section 'Thematic Space,' is In times of dehumanization: the emergence of ontological criticism in the educational complex, by Patricia Laura Torrigli, Vidalcir Ortigara, and Astrid Baecker Avila. The authors criticize the conception of education in the capitalist sociability and the devaluation of the research and human development. They advocate the need for a new form of knowledge that considers totality, pointing out the prominence of the ontology of the social being. In their work The production of knowledge and the political ethical project of social work, Sandra Lourenço de Andrade Fortuna and Olegna de Souza Guedes consider knowledge production as one expression of human activity. According to the authors, it is necessary to establish connections between research on social work and the social meaning of the profe...