ERIS Annual Conference 2023 - Social Work in Crisis: Solution or part of the problem?

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This year, we focus our activities on social work in times of crisis:

Current social, political, economic, and ecological events pose enormous challenges for social work. Given crisis-ridden forecasts for global development, we are challenged more than ever to rethink established approaches and experiences for local action and seek alternatives.

Social work as a discipline and profession is part of the social conditions in which crises arise and are dealt with. But it remains largely unclear what position and function social work can take in relation to the crises at hand. Social work is integrated into social crisis dynamics and by the international definition engaged with core aspects that are usually at stake in times of crisis: social cohesion, social justice, and human rights. At the same time, social work promotes social change and development, empowerment, and liberation of people.

It is obvious that social work responds to social problems and has built up a social infrastructure as a preventive measure to overcome crises so that it can provide services in accordance with its mandate. But how does it deal with the unforeseen, as represented by the pandemic? Have problems become perpetuated, or have new ones emerged? Has the crisis management profession been able to develop new approaches or has it experienced a loss of significance? How does it deal with failures, which are just evident in organizational failures? Or has it been able to build new self-confidence by dealing with uncertainty in a volatile world? But how much is this worth if social work, as a service profession that also makes profits, lacks ethical behavior on the part of its management? In general, is this also a question of the function of social work? How far can the dissolution of the boundaries of social work progress?

Conference information

The ERIS conference take place on the 20./21.10.2023.

The venue is the Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt (THWS) in Germany, Münzstraße 12, 97070 Würzburg.

More information about conference

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Updated: 18. 03. 2023