Do paradigma da exclusão ao paradigma da opressão. Nos interstícios entre trabalho social, economia popular e movimento social

Abstract

Exploring the issues faced by asocial work professional confronted with the paradoxes of the fight against exclusion, the starting point for this research is the invisibilization of the popular economy of waste recovery and resale, known as biffe, in the Ile-de-France region. However, it has made visible a network that is expanding internationally. The experiences of the biffins were put into dialogue with those of the National Movement of Recyclers of Recyclable Materials in Brazil and the Landless Rural Workers Movement in Brazil. The individual and collective strategies at play in these spaces of production and reproduction of life, at a distance from institutionalised social work, are analysed using a multi-referential theoretical framework combining institutional analysis, epistemologies of the South and social geography. A co-supervision with a Brazilian university has helped to rebalance one of the characteristics of this project, which is that it is situated on a historical line of exclusion between two continents. The denaturalisation of the gaze thus produced was reinforced by the place given to the actors in an inductive and collaborative methodology for an analysis that gives a significant place to their points of view, giving a glimpse of part of what is constructed and experienced in these collectives. The trip played a key role in shifting the focus to a different frame of reference, away from the paradigm of exclusion that dominates in France. I discovered the Brazilian paradigm of oppression in the roots of the two Brazilian social movements involved, through the influence of liberation theology and Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. The political dimension of the collectives' activities directly challenges the established social work in France. Thinking of the fight against exclusion as a paradigm has helped to show its tendency to assign its recipients to an underprivileged social position in a circularity of social work practices that reinforce what they are supposed to be fighting against. Resistance from those involved has shown that this paradigm is not universal. It not only produces isolated individuals who are losing their bearings, but also groups rebuilding their identities. Surprisingly, the "life analyser" reveals two seemingly antagonistic organisations. In institutions dominated by the paradigm of exclusion, life seems to have already been written by projects and mechanisms, whereas in movements based on the paradigm of oppression, it seems to be written collectively.