Social work, forced mobility: social protection micro-practices

Abstract

Principles of solidarity and justice are now being renewed through practices where social workers reconceptualize social protection by analytical categories and everyday practices beyond institutionalised borders and boundaries. This doing, apparently a marginal phenomenon has an own value because it emerges in a context of fragmented societies where social dimensions are being removed from the understanding human live. This article discusses the content of these actions aimed at the social protection of women and children who are forced to cross the Mediterranean. These practices are developed on the margins of—and in collaboration with—local actors, where social responsibility is shared with institutions and organizations that provide different approaches and adapting their resources to provide social protection to people forced to mobility. We explore how, through these experiences and encounters with unprotected women and children, some local actors are challenging institutionalised representations reconceptualizing the phenomenon of mobility from knowledge acquired in their everyday interactions with groups forced to be in mobility. We draw attention to the limited yet complex scale of these endeavours, where an assemblage of micropractices, are defending social dimensions in the understanding of and the social work doing with human mobility.