Navigating Professional Politics
Focusing on the role of social work in bridging the gap between government and citizens
This research line looks into the role of social work in bridging the gap between government and citizens. Our team explores collective, community-based forms of social support, such as youth work and community work. The goal is to understand how social workers, other professionals and concerned citizens in community work can bridge the distance and growing mistrust between government and citizens, and how they can mediate between diverse interests and views in complex power relations.
Additionally, Navigating Professional Politics focuses on the politicizing potential of community work as a social practice and studies how local projects in Dutch cities can serve as inspiration for sustainable cooperation between government and citizens. Key questions include: How is the opportunity to participate in or establish community work distributed in our society? And, how can existing local communities influence the policy frameworks within which they operate?
While there is hope that social work contributes to improving collaborations between government and citizens, knowledge about how social workers can do this successfully and what is needed to do so remains limited. The ambition of this research is to work with practitioners and local communities to close this knowledge gap. An essential part of the research is intensive fieldwork with different partners who are part of the Community of Practice.
The Community of Practice meetings create a space to discuss challenges practitioners face. Researchers share insights from their fieldwork and practitioners reflect on them. What are recognizable challenges and factors in working on social justice together with different types of communities? How do social workers relate to the interests and needs of the communities they work with on the one hand, and the policy frameworks in which they need to operate on the other? This unique exchange between research and practice is part of our ambition to strengthen social work practice in terms of agenda setting and addressing social issues.
Navigating Professional Politics is one of the three research projects within the overarching NWO project ‘Crafting Resilience’. Lecturer Femke Kaulingfreks is the project leader (Principal Investigator) of this line of research. Research is carried out by postdoctoral researcher Lieke Wissink and PhD students Sharifah Redan (Inholland University) and Anke van den Dries (Hogeschool van Amsterdam). Senior researchers working closely within Navigating Professional Politics are Jeroen Gradener (Hogeschool van Amsterdam), Richard de Brabander (Inholland), and Marcel Spierts (independent researcher).
