José Fernando Siqueira da Silva

Violência e Serviço Social: notas críticas

This theoretical essay presents some important observations about violence as a social phenomenon that places particular demands upon Social Work. It suggests ways to handle this critical category of Social Work. It works from the perspective of totality, emphasizing the diverse unity between ontology (the existence of a social being) and gnosology (knowledge about this being), considering the reconstruction of the issue proposed as ‘concrete thought’.

Serviço Social: razão ontológica ou instrumental?

This essay analyzes the opposition between ontological and instrumental perspectives as a reference for the particular field of the professions and the process of professional education of social workers. To do so it raises an important question: what type of professional is to be educated, intellectuals or technical-operatives? Considering the current stage of capitalist accumulation, it seeks to contribute to the contemporary debate about the strategic social direction assumed since the 1990s by the main representative organizations of the professional category of social workers in Brazil.

Research and Social Work: contributions to criticism / Pesquisa e Serviço Social: contribuições à crítica

This paper aims at offering contributions to the debate on Social Work research, an imperative process to professionals who deal with the continued and expanded reproduction of social inequality in the mature bourgeois system (broadly characterized as the “social issue”). This is done by considering the several contradictions that currently exist for carrying out totality-oriented research, focused on the wealth of reality itself (in its objective logic). What are the paths to foster the production of genuinely ontological-material studies? What are the main hurdles to that? How the specificities of Social Work research can be located in this controversial context?

Pesquisa e Serviço Social: contribuições à crítica / Research and Social Work: contributions to criticism

O artigo em questao se propoe a oferecer contribuicoes ao debate sobre a pesquisa em Servico Social, processo este imprescindivel aos profissionais que lidam cotidianamente com a reproducao continuada e ampliada da desigualdade social na ordem burguesa madura (genericamente caracterizada como “questao social”). Faz isto considerando as inumeras contradicoes atualmente existentes para a realizacao de pesquisas orientadas pelo ponto de vista da totalidade, centradas na riqueza da propria realidade (na sua logica objetiva). Quais caminhos devem ser trilhados para estimular a elaboracao de estudos genuinamente ontologico-materiais? Quais os principais obstaculos para isto? Como situar as particularidades da pesquisa em Servico Social nesse contraditorio contexto?

Notas sobre o Trabalho Social cubano

This paper analyses social work in Cuba, its challenges and perspectives. It also emphasizes ways and possibilities to reaffirm the present importance of critical debate among Cuban social worker and the necessary dialogue with Marxs social theory.