Intervención

Centennial Writings and the Evolution of Social Work in Latin America.

Rodrigo Cortés-Mancilla — 2025-07-31

THE CHALLENGE OF INTERCULTURALITY IN THE 100 YEARS OF CHILEAN SOCIAL WORK

Walter Molina Chávez — 2025-07-31

Chilean Social Work commemorates a century since its professional and disciplinary configuration (1925–2025). Like Chilean society in the early 21st century, it faces a range of complex challenges. Among the most urgent and cross-cutting is the pursuit of equality. At the same time, the challenge of interculturality emerges—understood as a normative principle that highlights the need to recognize and value the diverse ways of life of Indigenous peoples. These ways of life are rooted in material and sociocultural foundations that have long contributed to the construction of Chilean society. In this context, it is essential to develop a complex understanding of interculturality, both as a human phenomenon and as an expression of genuine recognition of Indigenous people. Such understandings are vital for advancing toward a more humane, equitable, and pluralistic society—economically, socially, culturally, and politically.

The construction of a Latin American and Caribbean critical-professional project, with political-epistemic implications in social work at an international level

Silvana Martínez — 2025-07-31

The professional organizations of Social Work are spaces of resistance and collective struggles, construction of memories, disputes of meaning around the professional project, legitimization and hierarchization of the profession, defense of our working conditions, political and social positioning before socially significant issues, construction of collective agendas, among other purposes. This way of conceiving professional organizations is in tension with the same neoliberal logic, since it seeks to sustain and deepen individualistic practices and social fragmentation. In the course of these 100 years of creation of the profession in our region, several organizations have been founded that have nucleated and continue to nucleate the professional collective. From these collective spaces, a Critical Professional Project has been built, which was able to dispute power and agenda at the international level, leading in 2018 the International Federation of Social Workers. It is a transcendental event for the region, whose political and epistemic drifts implied a process of politicization, blackening and decolonization of international Social Work. The centenary of the profession allows us to look in perspective, at the same time that configures an ideal scenario to account for this process, dimension it and value it, since it constitutes a highly relevant historical milestone for the Latin American and Caribbean Social Work and Social Work at the international level.

Social Work in the Complexity of the 21st Century. Readings from a Model of Empty Hermeneutics

Víctor Rodrigo Yáñez-Pereira — 2025-07-31

This article arises from a documentary review of literature to problematize a research project that seeks to establish hermeneutical foundations in Social Work that foster interpretations of contemporary issues, contributing to the dismantling of contradictions, ambiguities, and inequalities in 21st-century society. Based on the shortcomings, flaws, and obstacles in development processes, it is possible to reveal cracks in the everyday life of various modus vivendi (cosmologies, genders, styles, living conditions). This issue, while transversal to science, is worth examining from the perspective and configuration of a discipline that, in Chile and Latin America, celebrates 100 years of contributions to the democratization of society. The premise is that the main models existing in Social Work are based on the Old European sociological tradition, which, in scientific literature, demonstrates a theoretical and methodological repertoire that responds to the so-called models for professional intervention. However, since the new millennium, significant advances have emerged that place understanding as an explanatory principle in the construction of knowledge situated in complex contexts. From this perspective, a proposed model of empty hermeneutics for the analysis and interpretation of the social is outlined.

Producing Knowledge for Action: The Contributions of Sociography and Statistics in the 1940s. The School of Social Work of Santa Fe

Indiana Vallejos Suárez — 2025-07-30

In this article, we describe and analyze the contributions of sociography and statistics to the teaching of research at the School of Social Work of Santa Fe (Argentina) during the 1940s.
The professionalization and rationalization of welfare required agents with solid research training, capable of acting on a scientific basis and with knowledge of the population's needs, in order to inform the decisions of the government and to enable rational planning of social interventions.
This study recovers the contributions of Dr. Emilio Sánchez Rizza and accountant and social worker Angela Teresa Vigetti, both of whom were dedicated to the practice and teaching of research. We also analyse other documentary sources from the period, as well as publications by various contemporary authors who debate the history and teaching of sociology and statistics—fields which, to date, have rarely entered dialogue with our discipline.

Human Rights and Social Work in the Chilean Dictatorship. Intervening to resist

Katherine Henríquez — 2025-07-30

During the Chilean military dictatorship (1973-1990), the practices of social work were unfolded as a field of political emancipation and human rights (HR) defense. The memories of social workers involved in those practices are therefore important records of the defense of human dignity, and key voices to avoid repeating HR violations. The present study proposes revisiting collectively the place of the HR as an ethic and political framework of social interventions developed by social workers during the dictatorship. To this effect, we used an approach that articulates the memories of diverse actors, critical analysis, and the examination of professional documents, exploring the relevance of formative education and praxis of the HR in the configuration of social work. The dialogue that emerges from the historical records, social worker testimonies, and specialized literature put under stress the relationship between academic formation, professional praxis, and ethical compromise in situationis of repression and political violence. This study provides a situated interpretation of the HR from a professional role, highlighting critical social work practices that survived oblivion, defending the human dignity as a horizon of transformation for the Chilean social work.

Incorporation of Gender Perspective in Social Intervention: Disputes and Meanings.

Cory Duarte Hidalgo — 2025-07-30

This article analyses the incorporation of a gender perspective into social intervention from a situated, critical, and territorial perspective. In a context marked by structural inequalities and restrictive institutional frameworks, it proposes understanding gender not as an applicable technique, but as an analytical and political category that transforms the very meaning of the act of intervention. The question guiding the study is: how is a gender perspective incorporated into social intervention practices, according to professional narratives? Using a qualitative approach with a multiple-case study design, narrative interviews with social professionals were used. The analysis was conducted from a critical narrative perspective, recovering the meanings, affects, and positions that emerge in an everyday practice. The results reveal tensions between institutional regulations and the micropolitical strategies deployed by professionals to resist the depoliticization of gender. Embodied resistance, active silences, and care practices are observed as forms of feminist intervention. It is concluded that incorporating a gender perspective into social intervention requires decent material conditions, transformative institutional frameworks, and situated professional training. Social intervention must be rethought as a political, conflictual, and transformative practice.

A genealogy of social interventions with childhood in Chile, problematizations from social work

Mauricio Sánchez-Aliaga — 2025-07-30

This article critically analyzes the historical configuration of social intervention with children and families in Chile, questioning the apparent current centrality of children and youth as priority subjects of protection and rights. Although contemporary discourse acknowledges such centrality, historically, the focus has predominantly been on the family as the primary object of intervention, suggesting a continuity in institutional targeting that transcends normative or discursive shifts. The study adopts a genealogical perspective—both epistemic and methodological—in order to trace the conditions of knowledge-power that have sustained these practices. To this end, twelve issues of the journal Servicio Social, published by the School of Social Work of the Junta de Beneficencia de Santiago, were examined, alongside contemporary technical guidelines on childhood policies in Chile. The genealogical approach applied made it possible to identify dominant discursive practices, intervention devices, and meaning structures that have legitimized specific ways of addressing childhood and the family. The findings reveal an episteme that supports and reproduces hegemonic approaches to childhood, positioning the family as a central and normative subject of intervention. This continuity highlights how certain interpretive frameworks persist over time, shaping institutionalized truths about childhood. In conclusion, the article proposes a critical reflection on the historical logics of intervention and their implications for current policies and practices directed at children and their family environments.

A century in reflection: social work and the Colo-Colo social and sports club at the crossroads of popular culture, politics, and community

Ignacio alexander González Alvarez — 2025-07-31

This reflection offers a historical and political analysis of the symbolic convergence between the centennial of the Colo-Colo Social and Sports Club and the one hundred years of Social Work in Chile. Beyond a mere chronological coincidence, it explores the ties both trajectories have maintained with popular sectors, their territories, and their struggles. Since their origins in 1925, both the club and the profession emerged as organized responses to social exclusion, each fostering community building from different fronts: sports and social intervention. The period of Social Work Reconceptualization (1960–1973) overlapped with Colo-Colo’s rise as a popular symbol, generating spontaneous intersections in neighborhood and community spaces. The civic-military dictatorship marked an authoritarian rupture for both institutions: the closure of Social Work schools and the state intervention in the club curtailed their participatory dimensions. Nonetheless, each persisted as grassroots forms of social resistance. In the post-dictatorship era, Social Work and the club alike faced the tensions of a constrained democracy and a neoliberal model that commodified the social sphere. In recent decades, the renewed community role of Colo-Colo —through internal leadership, local chapters, and territorial projects— has resonated with contemporary Social Work’s intersectional and ethical-political approaches. This text invites a reconsideration of the public, cultural, and transformative significance of both experiences in light of today’s social challenges.

Itineraries of argentine cash transfers: recent history and enigmas of the present

Martin Eduardo Hornes — 2025-07-31

The objective of this paper is to trace a journey through the recent history of social policies of monetary transfer in the Argentine Republic and to inquire about their possible transformations in the short term. Resorting to a characterization of the social policies that have innovated the forms of intervention on the social question since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the article details the main functions they assumed in different periods of government in the Argentine Republic, pointing out their durability and consolidation, and opening a debate around the challenges posed by the emergence of a liberal/libertarian government.

The substitute penalty: Provision of services for the benefit of the community in Chile

Alejandro Montero Sainz de la Peña — 2025-07-31

This article presents the Community Service Penalty in Chile with the perspective of raising awareness of this public policy, which has been implemented for 12 years in a national penitentiary context, and at the same time recognizing a new context for social intervention within a public policy on restorative justice and community. The recognition and identification of this penalty begins by framing how this social reintegration process is articulated within a public policy in the penitentiary setting, based on the open system of the Chilean Gendarmerie. The methodology used is a bibliographic review. This allows for a new body of knowledge to be generated and analyzed, strengthening the qualitative reference of the phenomenon of community service for adult criminal offenders. With the entry into force of Law 20.603 in June 2012, the Chilean Gendarmerie's open system was strengthened, introducing a new set of alternative sentences to serving a sentence in freedom. Since December 2013, the Gendarmerie's open system has introduced a new sentence that allows for serving a sentence based on community service.

Systematization of critical dialogical processes of knowledge on the systematization of experiences in the field of community mental health, Chile, 2024

Rosa María Cifuentes Gil — 2025-07-31

In this text, I share reflections on the systematization of a training experience I supported through the continuing education course "Dialogues of knowledge on systematization of experiences, challenge, proposal, and potency.” This course was offered through the master's program in Mental Health and Community Psychiatry at the Doctor Salvador Allende School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile, and developed in the second semester of 2024. The intense, complex, productive, and empowering nature of the course warrants its systematization and dissemination. I present the course conception, its critical reconstruction, contents, dialogic processes, and their results, the systematization process, as well as reflections on co-constructed learning, focusing on critical dialogic processes, highlighting the esthetical, didactical, and methodological dimensions that underlie the training processes in which we promote meaningful, critical, and transformative learning, in line with SE.

Among threads, knots, and openings: the complex weave of community process facilitation

Trinidad Cereceda-Lorca — 2025-07-31

I understand the facilitation of community processes as a situated, deeply relational practice that requires holding uncertainty, embracing diversity, and listening to what has been historically silenced. Through the images of the project “Sangre de mi sangre” (Blood of My Blood), I attempt to think of facilitation as a textile art: weaving with others not to reach a finished result, but to enable spaces where singularities and collectivities coexist. Knots are not seen as mistakes, but as creative tensions; openings, as spaces for air, for new voices. To facilitate, then, is not to lead or intervene from a supposed neutrality. It is to step aside, to recognize the knowledge already present in the territory, to open space for languages that go beyond words — bodies, gestures, materialities — and to hold controversy without shutting it down. In a time marked by fragmentation and market logic, facilitation is also a political act of recovering the commons, of rebuilding the social fabric. This essay is an attempt to make that complex weave visible: between affections, power, listening, and collective creation. Because what emerges from the encounter always exceeds our initial intentions. And because to facilitate, from my perspective, is to carefully weave the threads of the commons, knowing that in each knot and in each opening lies the possibility of other possible worlds.

Leyton, C. (ed.) (2024). Implementación de políticas sociales en Chile: RIL Editores. ISBN 978-956-01-1648-2.

Cristóbal Villalobos Dintrans — 2025-07-31

The book “Implementation of Social Policies in Chile”, edited by Cristian Leyton, challenges the traditional view of social policies as centralized plans whose success is measured solely by outcomes. Instead, it proposes focusing on the implementation process, valuing local adaptation and the agency of implementers. Through 11 empirically-based chapters, three key findings emerge: institutional fragility in policy implementation, the active role of implementers, and the gap between policy design and execution. While the book offers a critical and in-depth perspective, it is critiqued for presenting a limited view of the social and lacking broader historical and intersectoral context.