Bridging solidarities: coping with moral emotions

How can social workers foster and maintain bridging solidarities? And what does our knowledge about bridging solidarities imply for social work education? In encounters between social workers, volunteers and citizens with a migration and/or refugee background, cultural differences can be serious obstacles. Social workers often find creative, practical solutions to coping with cultural difference, thereby fostering bridging solidarities. We will discuss some of these creative inventions and their implications for social work education. However, in practice other issues (than cultural difference) are often equally or even more pressing. Issues like how to achieve reciprocity and equivalence in the interaction. Or how to cope with moral emotions such as compassion, duty, gratefulness, and pride. We will therefore also discuss how such moral emotions can be obstacles to fruitful interaction between different groups and what social workers can do to overcome them and foster bridging solidarities. The lecture is based on international literature as well as on empirical research on encounters between social workers, volunteers and people with a migration and/or refugee status in the Netherlands.

Calling for care in technological societies: Ethical boundaries and impacts on social work education

Over the last few years, many scientific works have been reflecting on how technology influences Social Work processes, values and principles. Although it contains positive elements that can be used in favour of more creative and strategic social intervention, the technologization of processes and interactions does not cease to involve renewed and highly complex issues. Reflection around the ethical thresholds of the professional relationship, for example, and the redefinition of deontological principles become central. How is it possible to ensure privacy and confidentiality and prevent dual relationships? How can social work implement cultural competence to apprehend the multidimensionality of the problematics experienced by audiences from different cultures that populate the same spaces (even virtual spaces)? How is it possible to bridge the digital divide in accessing and understanding social, economic and political rights? The talk will discuss concepts such as “digital empathy”, among others, and advocate the need for a renewed ethics of care permeated with ethics of justice and “digital intelligence”. The construction of a fair care society is affirmed as the humanist axis in a society that runs the risk of concealing what is human. This implies a renewed advocacy around diversity, the creation of bonds, sustainability and justice, which uses technological means and tools in the best way but goes beyond them to build a conscious and consistent humanism. The role of Social Work in building this renewed ethical-political project is central, but educational models must also be revisited. A brief reflection on the axes for the transformation of educational models in Social Work in the light of ongoing transformations will constitute the closing topic of the communication.