Palliative Social Work: Between risk reduction and relative integration

Abstract

The welfare state has been reconfigured a little everywhere around the active welfare state, more specifically around the state of social investment, which is based on the development of individuals' capacities of action, supporting their conditions of realization. However, there is an implicit postulate in these forms of action. It is assumed that each holds socially significant and socially adaptable capacities. However, because of their biographical trajectory and the nature of the demands of the socio-economic system, some individuals can not assume a triggering logic. For this population, it is not emancipation that is at the center of the intervention, but vulnerability.

First of all, we are obliged to note the coexistence of two new figures in social work, one that seeks to promote positive potential and the other that seeks to counter negative potentialities. This article proposes to explore, alongside the dominant figure of generative social work, the contours of a social palliative intervention that strives to maintain a follow-up work but a slow work.