Learning Democracy in Social Work

Abstract

At present, an increased feeling of a democratic decline results in a renewed appeal for social work to investigate socialisation for democracy and citizenship. Citizenship as a political concept refers to the citizen as subject with civil, political and social rights. A social conception of citizenship reduces citizenship to civic virtue, defined as the engagement to participate actively in the further development of a model of democracy. Social work has a fundamentally different position in both conceptions of citizenship. It is suggested that in a political conception, social work supports citizens in taking part in the process of democracy, whereas in a social conception, social work becomes a policy instrument focusing on the citizen’s duty to smoothly integrate in the prevailing democratic project and, in doing so, to contribute to social cohesion. In this chapter, we challenge this suggestion. We argue that only in the tension between a political and social conception of citizenship, the educational dimension of social work becomes clear, and it is through this dimension that social work can become a democratic practice. The educational dimension in social work is crucial to conceptualise democracy as an open and ongoing process and not as a predefined project. This argument results from a pedagogical perspective on social work. This perspective enables us to connect rather than oppose social and political conceptions of citizenship. It is in this dialectic tension that we find a meaningful answer to the question of how to relate social work to learning democracy.