Radical Experiences of Portuguese Social Workers in the Vanguard of the 1974 Revolution

Abstract

This paper focuses on the contribution of social workers to the Portuguese democratic transition in the 1970s. Their involvement in urban social mobilizations and in the cooperative movement will offer a perspective on the participation of social workers alongside the Revolutionary process and how they, through engaging with social mobilisation, grass-roots initiatives and socio-political activism, deployed practices consistent with radical social work frames. It is argued that the Revolution provided the structural conditions for social workers to engage with radical practice and that their intervention constituted a form of agency for sociopolitical transformation, while influencing professional self-representations and professional agency.

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

“…Then, the designation of the social work career in public services (Branco, 2009) which evokes a professional identity related to positivist, rational and scientificbureaucratic principles (Amaro, 2015). The interviewee's final statement, which can be (Silva, 2019a).…”

“…Having entered Lisbon's Higher Institute of Social Work in September 1974, she soon caught up with the revolutionary flow and, following the radical changes introduced in social work's academic curricula and internship practice, she developed field observation assignments in rural cooperative movements, becoming a full member of one of the flagship initiatives of the revolutionary times, the Torre Bela agrarian cooperative. This cooperative, situated only 70 kms away from Lisbon, was founded in April 1975 by a grassroots movement which occupied the hunting estate of an aristocratic family (Silva, 2019a).…”

“…Among its objectives was the implementation of unconventional solutions regarding housing construction and rehabilitation, relying on participatory processes and wide involvement of local collective structures (Andrade, 1992). Part of the programme implied setting community organisation strategies to which social workers gave a major contribution (Silva, 2018, 2019a). Referring to this period, the subject’s narrative reveals the presence of decisions that do not coincide and, in certain moments, collide with dominant social work professional identity discourses:As people were about to be evicted I went immediately to that neighbourhood and said: ‘What if we organise an association and start a self-organised construction process?’.…”