Social Welfare Studies

This publication, developed by the Green European Foundation with support of the Finnish Green Cultural and Educational Centre "Visio", is a first step by the two organisations in mapping the various problems Roma communities in Europe are facing and showcasing several initiatives that have successfully tackled the causes and effects of these problems. The book benefits from contributions of both renowned experts in the Roma rights field, as well as of prominent Green politicians and activists working on the topic.

The recent flow of Roma immigrants to Western Europe has caused a lot of societal and political discussion. Initiatives and policy measures are introduced at the European and national or local level in order to deal with this situation. This article explores to what extent experiences and self-perceptions of Roma immigrants in Western Europe correspond with the constructed discourse in terms of “Roma inclusion”. In policy practices, there seems to be a tension between a willingness to strengthen the particular identity of Roma on the one hand (“targeting”), and a desire to fit those people into mainstream society on the other hand (“mainstreaming”). Based on a case study in the city of Ghent (Belgium) with a small sample of in-depth interviews, the authors explore what an insider perspective may add to the construc- tion of policy. Conclusions relate to the experienced gap with mainstream society, the identification with and definition of the “Roma” concept as well as intergenerational differences. Finally, the argument is taken a step further, and it is wondered how an insider perspective may also question policy. By relating policy conceptualisations of Roma to (self) identification processes, suggestions are made to redefine the meaning of inclusion.

In the authors’ aim to go beyond the ‘silent’ school desk they returned to sources such as public contracts, photographs, advertising leaflets and (the often neglected) patents kept in the municipal archives of Brussels. In this article, they focus on the first half of the twentieth century and two phases of the ‘life‐cycle’ of the school desk, namely the design phase on the one hand and the production phase on the other hand. What desks were designed and by whom (cf. patents)? Which desks were effectively produced for use in the municipal schools of Brussels? The transition between these two phases – the place where only some designs were brought to ‘life’ – occupies a special place. The paper concludes with a case study on the school furniture of Oscar Brodsky, a designer who kindled the authors’ interest through his publicity campaign of the 1920s and 1930s.

The works of the Belgian neurologist and educationist Ovide Decroly (1871–1932) extended over the medical and pedagogical fields as well as both the practical‐professional and the theoretical‐disciplinary fields. For this reason, Decroly seemed to be a suitable starting point for a contribution to the problem outlined by Hofstetter and Schneuwly of “the birth and development of a disciplinary field in education”, all the more so because they proposed that the topic be broached from “the role of institutes and congresses”. Putting Decroly in the centre of our perspective offers a double advantage. The making of science, thus also the discipline‐formation process, is an inherently communicative and social event and is bound to the individual or “the actor as an agent of change”. In addition, a case study of Decroly gives the opportunity to test against a multitude of different congresses the concrete problem of the birth and development of a disciplinary field in education. In the limited scope of an article, however, it is not possible to analyse all these congresses in detail. In spite of his apparently very wide‐ranging congress itinerary, two constants struck us: first, it turned out that Decroly in his presentations limited himself to only a handful of closely related subjects, and, second, two associations predominated throughout Decroly's entire congress itinerary: the Société protectrice de l'enfance anormale (SPEA) and the Société belge de Pédotechnie (SBP). The SPEA and the SBP seemed to form a bridge between the academic‐institutional level and the communicative level of the congresses. The two associations, which can be considered networks that operated at the intersection of the theoretical‐disciplinary and the practical‐professional fields, thus provided a promising way for the authors to operationalize their objective – the study of congresses and institutes starting from Decroly. This article will proceed in three stages. First, the SPEA and the SBP will be introduced and the relationship Decroly had with these associations will be examined. Then, the extent to which the SPEA and the SBP determined Decroly's congress itinerary will be examined, and on the basis of Decroly's relationship with these associations, it will be shown how they contributed to the institutionalization of the educational sciences in Belgium. Finally it is wondered whether, by shifting the focus from congresses and institutes to networks, one does have a concretization of what Hofstetter and Schneuwly, refering to Stichweh, call the “(predominantly) secondary disciplinarization” of the educational sciences?

This article attempts to contribute to the historically relevant debate about the role of social work in poverty situations, focusing on the emblematic and radical question whether the poor actually need social work. In the context of the currently dominant policy framework in European welfare states, that is underpinned by the emerging paradigm of social investment, we argue that it is extremely relevant to readdress this question. Within this development, the eradication of child poverty has been considered a key target of poverty reduction strategies and child and family social work has consequently been assigned a pivotal role in the fight against the intergenerational transmission of poverty. We demonstrate that the rhetoric of social investment has found a practical implementation in social work constructing the problem of poverty in terms of education and activation of both the child and the individual parent. Based on an extensive review of literature, we discuss underlying assumptions, consequences and pitfalls of the paradigm of social investment for social work and tease out whether, and on which conditions, poor families need child and family social work.