The radical turn of Portuguese social work during the democratic transition (1974–76)

Abstract

The transition to democracy in Portugal in the 1970s provides the socio-historical background for this article. It focuses on the period of 1974–76, known as the revolutionary phase, when a series of progressive political programmes, forms of direct democracy, collective mobilisation and widespread grass-roots initiatives emerged in the aftermath of the dictatorial regime. The experiences of Portuguese social workers in the aforementioned revolutionary vanguards will be compared and interpreted by using the radical social work approaches that sprang up in the UK and US at the time. Ten in-depth interviews with social workers involved in radical intervention during the revolutionary phase will be compared to the key tenets of the radical social work literature of the 1970s.

The relevance of biographic narratives for social workers’ professional memory, reflexivity and identity

“…The article will explore the relationship between oral history and biographic methods and narrative analysis, critical reflection, reflexivity and identity (re)framing, based on three examples taken from an ongoing research. The empirical ground is a set of biographic interviews collected from Portuguese social workers who were actively engaged in some of the most progressive programmes, projects and events developed in Portugal after the 1974 Revolution, when the country transited from dictatorship to democracy (Silva, 2019b).…”