Contenu du sommaire : La politique de l'action sociale

This paper describes the creation of a social and health community centre, developed in an action-research project, with elderly migrant women by a social worker who was also a militant for migrants' rights. This experience is compared to other community development projects in France. The first part of the text identifies how the commitment in this experimentation is supported theoretically by the principles of community action and by the care feminists' reflexions on situated-knowledge. The second part of the text expounds how the practices try to « re-institute » both people and rights through two key points, common to other places : Firstly, hospitality and conviviality (specially in their cultural dimension) allow the emergence of needs and resources to act at the same time. Secondly, concrete care about right effectiveness leads to build tools and tactics to make it happen really.

This article underlines the thesis that reflective practices, initiated with multiple actors including the so-called "vulnerable" individuals, contribute to change both at individual and interpersonal levels. In order to achieve this, one must create physical or figurative meeting spaces. The practices that then develop promote awareness and collective thinking, as well as enriching and transforming social action. In turn, the collective thoughts that emerge permit individual and collective subjectivation processes, and are guarantees of benefits for all.

The social workers employed in the asylum seeking system often come face to face with the paradoxes of their missions. They find themselves challenged between offering support and help, and monitoring the asylum seekers they are in charge of. In this context, they sometimes find it difficult to always keep in mind professional ethics (confidentiality, personalised monitoring, equity etc.) whilst still responding to injunctions from authorities and/or hierarchy. In order to stay in this field of work, they need to compromise, which we will refer to as « practical arrangements ». However they also develop ways of resisting, and workarounds, which are mostly individual and discreet, but always with the objective of staying first and foremost at the service of the people they are accompanying.

This article focuses on the political dimension of three models of associative management. It deals with their political characteristics regarding the internal and external challenges toward institutional compromises. While some authors maintain that the associative movement can legitimise itself through an internal challenge to institutional compromises, the use of Robert Merton's modes of adaptation reveals the political dimension of the deviance of those left behind by the public authorities. On the contrary, the alterity of an associative movement as an external criticism to institutional compromises seems not only to broaden the range of norms of social intervention, but also to reinforce belief in this model and the continuation of its project for the voiceless.

This paper explores a political dimension of the trip. It articulates professional practices in social work and theories of cosmopolitanism. This figures a reflexivity on a personal experience, which has been transformed in professional practices and a topic of research. It emphasizes the detours that must be involved for radically taking into account humanity in the complexity of self and otherness. Doing so, it highlights the political dimension of feeling concerned by social question and being sensitive to the ordeals of others.

During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, community engagement was commonly considered as one of the best approaches during humanitarian emergencies to respond to the outbreak. This principle has been also reasserted in the post-epidemic context of the implementation of a vaccine trial. This article presents and discusses, in a descriptive way, the modeling process of community involvement in the PREVAC vaccine trial in Guinea Conakry. Specifically, it discusses the contribution of anthropology to its design and implementation. The results indicate that ethnographic surveys (social histories of the epidemic and vaccine trials, social mapping) have made it possible to define a community partnership model which emphasizes the recognition and the valorization of communities' capacities to act and contribute with initiative responses to an epidemic, transparency in information sharing and permanent feedback to communities. This model is focused on the champions, individuals that communities value and trust, and recognize their prerogatives in leading social action and capacity to influence their willingness to engage. The activities they are supposed to promote (advocacy, community meetings, information sessions, home visits) allow, as the process progresses, to exchange transparent information, to solicit different levels of consent, which facilitates the appropriation of the vaccine trial. Ultimately, this article shows that beyond illuminating the ethical aspects, anthropology may have helped, by integrating emergent theory in a vaccine trial design, to think of a strategy to promote the trial through community partnership. However, the epistemological and methodological adjustments imposed by such a co-disciplinary experience could usefully be better observed and discussed.

This study endeavours to throw light on the practices in use in the Swiss disability insurance enforcement agencies that place benefit recipients in work. Based on empirical material made up of direct observations and interviews, supplemented by an analysis of existing documents, this paper shows that in practice, employment may lead to a downgrading in pay and professional status for benefit recipients when they are hired by a company. This downgrading is made possible by the federal legal provisions of the disability insurance itself : especially the injunction to benefit recipients to accept any suitable job, the calculation of a reduced rate of output for them, and the idea that the employer should not take any financial risks when hiring someone like them.