10 Years Since the Reopening of the Social Work Program at the University of Chile
In 2015, the Department of Social Work began its reopening process after several decades of closure resulting from measures adopted during the dictatorship. The reopening emerged as a collective endeavor that involved different generations, professionals, and diverse institutional processes.
The reopening was painful, gradual, and undoubtedly foundational. It involved a process of recognition and remembrance of those students who were detained and disappeared during that period, as well as the disrupted trajectories of many others who were dismissed, expelled from university classrooms, or whose educational processes were cut short. It is a legacy we continue to live with — with all its contradictions and unmet expectations — as a Public University.
In March 2015, the first cohort of Undergraduate students entered the program, after almost four decades without students in university classrooms. In May 2018, the first cohort of students in the Master’s Program did the same, joining the graduates of the University of Chile — showing that Social Work is a discipline that unfolds within the logics of the times of transformation we have lived through. This allows us, once again, with renewed knowledge, to confront the inequality that inhabits us and to open pathways toward better forms of social redistribution and public recognition of legitimate and plural ways of life.
This is a department with a consolidated academic body that brings together leading figures in the discipline with national recognition, and that actively dialogues with other social science disciplines. This explains its place within the Faculty of Social Sciences, the research projects that are undertaken, and the educational strategies such as the R&D&I Research Clusters (Research + Development of Social Interventions + Public Engagement), which constitute one of the program’s defining features.
Currently, five R&D&I Research Clusters are active, through which processes of public engagement, proposals for social programs, and innovative social interventions are developed, with the participation of other academics, professionals from public agencies and the third sector, and students from different disciplines.
The graduates of Social Work, as well as the team that makes up this Department, are pioneers of their time — just as the first women who entered, in 1925, the Social Service program of the Dr. Alejandro del Río School were. Today, just a few years away from the centennial of Social Work in Chile and Latin America, we want to recognize both the critical and progressive character of the discipline, and the capacity for innovation in the logics and ways of conceiving pedagogical processes and knowledge production.
Poster announcing the reopening of Social Work (2014)
