Participatory Social Work in Living Environment: Acting, Learning, and Knowledge Co-Production. The School of Łódź

Abstract

The Department of Social Pedagogy and Social Rehabilitation, founded by Helena Radlińska at the University of Lodz, has been developing an original variant of participatory social work for many years. A discourse analysis of this production process results in reconstruction its axial anchors (topos), such as: participation, critical perspective, interpretative assessment, non-deliberativity or political work. All those structural elements are processual, as they need to be adapted to changing social settings (e.g. communities getting more virtualized). Furthermore, the historical context must be considered to understand the participatory social work, as it has had a significant impact on the very concept of action, human strengths or structural empowerment. On top of this already quite complex construction is the triad: practice, knowledge, learning, each of its elements can be treated as a different genre of discourse. Interdiscursive integration of the genres is enabled by the traditionally embedded practice of combining research with action and education. The article ends with critical conclusions regarding the risk of following trends, exploitation of service users and the professionalization of everyday life.