The Social Service Internationalization Process: challenges and political direction

Abstract

This critical essay discusses the internationalization of Brazilian Social Work, understanding it as a result of the exchange between Postgraduate Programs, research groups and Social Work courses from different countries, whose objective is the production of knowledge and the expansion and qualification of academic debate and research. In a broader sense, it is essential to situate internationalization as a political process, full of contradictions and disputes, resulting from the exchange, within the scope of a “global knowledge economy”, a process with globalizing and imperialist tendencies. To analyze this process in Brazil, we must situate the profession as an area of production of knowledge, which has been constructed on its processing as a specialization of collective work, on the living conditions of the population with which it works and their collective struggles and especially on the social, economic, political and cultural reality with which Social Work establishes dialogue.