Social workers in the Revolution: Social work’s political agency and intervention in the Portuguese democratic transition (1974–1976)

Introduction

At the dawn of 25 April 1974, following a military coup, a group of mid-rank officers seized power in Portugal, overthrowing the Estado Novo (New State) regime and putting an end to almost half a century of right wing, conservative dictatorship. ¹ In the following months, the Revolution’s agenda was enforced, opening the way to what was to be called the Revolutionary Process Underway (RPU). ² Democratisation, decolonisation and development were three keywords that guided the progressive programme of the Armed Forces Movement and the left-wing provisional governments that took hold of power. From 1974 to 1976, when the democratic constitutional project began to solidify (Cerezales, 2003; Rezola, 2008) and the earlier progressive radical drift diluted, Portugal was the setting of ground-breaking socio-political reforms and experiences. Backed by the Revolution’s progressive agenda, a series of social services reforms, company workers’ self-management projects and land reforms, as well as a vast array of social movements and direct democracy practices, startled a country doleful from decades of totalitarian rule. It was in the midst of this social and political environment that Portuguese social work and some of its professionals and students saw an opportunity to lay the ground for an alternative practise paradigm, distancing themselves from the traditional assistance – focused forms of intervention instated during the Estado Novo regime. This particular chapter in the history of Portuguese social work can improve our understanding of political and social change in the country, a transformation in which many social workers were not sheer spectators of political renovation or mere executors of measures, but had their share of responsibility and agency in social change.

Our approach to this subject stems from an ongoing doctoral project in the field of the history of social work devoted to the study of social workers’ agency in the context of structural political change during the Portuguese democratisation process in the 1970s. The purpose of this article is to feature the basics of the aforementioned research while discussing its key-framing thesis and hypothesis. Taking the agency of social workers in the revolutionary process and their participation in the various political and social fronts that marked this period of Portuguese history as the central object of research, we meet Martins’ (2002) challenge of producing a historiography of contemporary Portuguese social work that could become instrumental in the (re)configuration of professional identity and grant visibility to the ways in which social workers’ professional practices became engaged with social and political movements. The aforementioned object of research can also provide interesting clues for developing a comparative analysis with other European countries facing similar historical processes of transition between right-wing authoritarian rule and democracy in the 1970s, for example, Greece and Spain. ³

The intervention of social workers alongside a variety of emerging social movements and political organisations (as mobilisers of collective action and agents of state services or political forces within the revolutionary period: Negreiros, 1999; Semblano, 2003) requires special attention and, in part, justification for researching that topic. Besides the implicit and immediate interest that this study brings to a better understanding of such a particular period of Portuguese social work history, we must consider the possibilities it offers for comprehending the revolutionary process itself through the lens of the participation of a group of professionals who had, more than a decade earlier, been claiming and experimenting a more progressive, democratic and participative approach to social intervention (Amaro, 2009; Branco, 2009; Martins, 2009). Thus, the involvement of social workers in the revolutionary process and their intertwining with other political agents and social actors allows for further research into collective mobilisation and political participation, bringing to the surface novel understandings that hatch from new sources, either documental or oral, about the origins, vitality and fading of social movements.

Furthermore, studying the participation of social workers in revolutionary collective mobilisations may offer a deeper knowledge of the way in which Portuguese social work became subject to reconfiguration in the aftermath of complex, structural and socio-political transformation. In this sense, looking into the social workers’ professional proceedings during this period may also provide a better understanding of the ways Portuguese social work formulated and adapted its theoretical and operative devices, whether in the context of professional practice or inside academia. Several historians have stated that the 1974 Revolution enabled a series of political opportunities for a very wide range of social and political actors (Cerezales, 2003; Rezola, 2008; Silva, 2014), a proposal that leads us to think that this may also be true for a large number of Portuguese social workers. It provided an opportunity offered by radical political change, with political backup and material resources, to put into place progressive intervention projects outside of the frame of eleemosynary forms of assistance.

In what follows, we will also address the present-day research on Portuguese social workers’ participation in the 1974 revolution, particularly underlining its status as a fairly neglected field of study, where the few findings lack proper systematisation and wider disclosure. At the same time, it will be pointed out that this subject is becoming a matter of scientific emergence, as pivotal oral sources are in danger of vanishing, taking to oblivion important testimonies and information on this very rich moment in contemporary Portuguese social work history.

Social workers’ revolutionary participation in Portugal – Prospects of a somehow derelict research object

Despite having caught the attention of a considerable number of researchers in the last three decades, the participation of social workers in the revolutionary process is still a fairly peripheral subject in the context of Portuguese social work research. Nevertheless, in the historiography of the Revolution and democratic transition, a few references, scattered and not particularly focused on social workers’ professional agency, can be found. The most abundant examples refer to social workers’ engagement with grass-roots collective mobilisations between 1974 and 1976 and projects of community organisation, as well as in programmes devised by state agencies or by the military, related to welfare, health, cultural and educational interventions (Almeida, 2009; Baía, 2012; Ferreira, 1994; Oliveira, 2004; Queirós, 2015; Silva, 2013; Varela, 2014). In this respect, in most of the published literature on the subject, oral sources are residual, with the consequential loss of valuable information voiced by the social workers that participated and, to some extent, took the vanguard of some of the flagship intervention projects of the revolutionary stage. ⁴ In a similar way, the historiography of social workers’ intervention alongside the collective mobilisations that were sparked after the 1974 coup is virtually devoid of analytical input from social movements theories, an approach that would render a much clearer understanding, not just of the engagements these professionals had with institutional structures, social actors and political agents, but also of their own role as political agents and their capacity for influencing public policy and street-level intervention practice.

Social workers’ participation in the revolutionary process epitomises a striking example of the singularity of the historical trajectory of Portuguese social work within the European context (Branco and Fernandes, 2005), reinforcing the importance of further examination of the subject. The relevance of this is justified, not simply because of the already-mentioned emergency for salvaging the important social memories of professionals, but also because it can contribute to organising, systematising and integrating data pertaining to a crucial stage in the history of Portuguese social work and welfare services provision. In addition, it presents an opportunity to deepen the knowledge and discussion about the Portuguese social workers’ professional identity, in particular, when Portugal underwent a series of accelerated socio-economic and cultural changes that affected social intervention models, professional status and qualification.

Historical contextualisation becomes a requirement of social work research that cannot be neglected, especially when scientific scrutiny is focused on the theories and procedures of social intervention or when the professional identity of social workers is under examination. The rapport between political, social, economic and ideological structures and the reconfiguration of social work’s professional practice models is just too obvious to go unnoticed. Agreeing with Baptista (2001), the evolution of social work’s intervention practice models and the professionals’ internal processes of category production cannot be properly understood if we do not consider the external environment that surrounds them, and, in this case, socio-historical analysis becomes a tool for understanding them.

Henceforth, the study of social workers’ participation in the revolutionary process can contribute to the aforementioned exercise of cross-referencing professional action dispositions with structural socio-political conditions. Such an endeavour requires the profiling of the social workers who were involved in revolutionary intervention projects. Looking into the whos that participated may help to understand the whys and hows behind such participation and to reflect about the ways that these intervention experiences influenced the production and reconfiguration of conceptual, theoretical and technical-operative devices, in an exercise that should not neglect the tensions, conflicts and debates engendered within the professional community of social work, both in the work field and in academia. These are debates that, as several authors have pointed out (Amaro, 2009; Branco, 2009), were raised during that particular cycle of rising liberties and interventional experimentation.

Portuguese social work from the 1960s to 1970s: Trends, ruptures and transformations

The earliest schools of social work, established in Lisbon (1935) and in Coimbra (1937), were founded under the auspices of the Estado Novo, carefully intended to fulfil the dictatorial regime’s political and ideological ends, in accordance with the Catholic Church’s social doctrine. The option of awarding the administration of these schools to catholic religious entities, setting them apart from the university system and trusting the pedagogical and technical guidance to individuals deeply aligned with the Estado Novo (Martins, 2010), is an unequivocal sign of how the beginning of Portuguese social work stood side-by-side with the dictatorship. ⁵ Social workers, more than mere healing and palliative caretakers, were expected to act doctrinally (Branco, 2009) in defence of traditional values regarding family organisation, patriarchal authority and asymmetrical gender roles. ⁶ In its earliest conception under the dictatorship, social work education in Portugal tried to develop a format of intervention in straight accordance with the world-views of the regime. Involving the Catholic Church and the Catholic secular movements was a fundamental piece of this architecture, given the proximity between religious values and the Estado Novo’s political and ideological concepts (Martins, 2010; Pimentel, 2001; Santos, 2009). In this sense, the orientation imprinted by French and Belgian social work (Martins, 2010) and its religious and palliative inclination presented a secure solution when it came to choosing the professionals, hired outside the country, who were supposed to accompany the installation of the first schools. The extreme care taken by the regime when dealing with the opening of social work education was evident, and distrust in foreign examples could not go unnoticed when Salazar spoke in 1935 of the risk that some forms of social work carried out in other countries might open the way to communism (Martins, 2010). Until the late 1940s, social workers carried out assistance activities, mainly within the State’s corporatist structure, ⁷ later extending to healthcare, schools and correctional services (Branco, 2009). As a product of a very selective and doctrinal educational scheme, Portuguese social workers were held captive by the Estado Novo’s authority and, at the same time, stood as conveyors of the regime’s moral order, acting as agents of social conformity and control.

However, from the early 1960s onwards, Portuguese social work was gradually affected by a series of transformations, whether at the level of professional practice or in terms of the education and training of those who aspired to become social workers (Branco, 2009). ⁸ Among the contributing factors to such discreet reconfiguration were the profound social, political and economic transformations that touched Europe in that decade, Portugal being no exception.

In the democratic and industrialised countries of Europe, social work was progressively enfolded by bureaucratised procedures, and welfare state models became stronger, driving social workers away from palliative, eleemosynary and paternalistic intervention (Fook, 2012). Along with this tendency for bureaucratisation, both the United States and Europe witnessed the rise of novel approaches to social work practice as alternatives to the case and group social work methods, that is, community social work. Under this emerging approach, an intervention paradigm focused on capacity building, participation and empowerment-gained expression. The 1960s also brought important changes within the Catholic Church, in the guise of the II Vatican Council. The revision of its social doctrine brought the Church closer to secular sectors, appealing to a less elitist participation of communities in assistance tasks. In the wake of these developments, Portugal witnessed the mobilisation of an increasing number of laymen and women, taking part in distinct organisations coordinated by Catholic religious authorities whose influence had a large social reach (students from all educational levels, including those studying in the universities, industrial and rural workers, etc.).

The 1960s also brought new challenges for social intervention, rising from the emergent social problems that followed migratory movements. New phenomena – why not say problems? – took shape in Europe, such as the slums of industrialised capitalist nations holding thousands of migrants originating from their rural peripheries or from the southern countries. Such tribulations, which caught part of the continent in the middle of an economic boom only recently rebuilt from post-war devastation, challenged European states to conceive new social policies and social workers to develop alternative approaches to deal with increasingly changing complex social realities. Driven, in part, by these circumstances, the influence of social sciences grew in academia as well as in the context of public policy making, gaining prominence in social work academic curricula and research and breaking with the long-term trend of psychology and hygiene-sanitarian prophylaxis dominion in social work education. These changes in the configuration of European social work – most noticeable in countries subject to the intervention of the Marshall Plan – have impacted Portuguese social work as well. Throughout the 1960s, the three existing social work schools gradually began to show signs of adjustment to curricula and intervention models in response to the developing international trends (Amaro, 2009; Branco, 2008, 2009; Mouro, 2001). An unmistakable mark of such adjustments and an omen for the transformations that were yet to come was the admission of men into educational and professional practice in social work in 1961 (Branco, 2009). It was in the mid-1960s that the earliest experiences of alternative community-oriented and non-palliative social work took form in Portugal. ⁹ This represented a test for a future political agency of social workers that, during the 1974 Revolution, had found the space, the opportunity and the means to fully and overtly accomplish it, as we will discuss later.

This leads to a hypothesis that ventures the possibility of considering the 1974 Revolution, not as a definite point of rupture in Portuguese social work but, instead, as an event that, by providing the ideal political conditions, allowed the pronouncement of a series of trends and movements within social work that had already been taking shape during the dictatorship. In fact, presenting the Revolution as a definite and unambiguous point of social, cultural and political fracture produces a simplistic view of the process, often resulting from a hasty understanding of the political radicalisation that swept the country from 1974 until 1976. Indeed, when we take a brief look at social workers’ professional action during the revolutionary stage, there is a perception of undisguised fracture, due to the multiplication and social visibility of alternative social work projects and the political involvement of a large number of professionals, as Branco (2009) suggests. However, a more thorough analysis of the literature on the evolution of social work in the years that preceded the 1974 military coup reveals that quite a few ruptures were already taking place in the final years of the dictatorship (Amaro, 2009; Coutinho, 1993; Rosa, 1997). As Martins (2002) puts it, we should not give in to the idea that during the dictatorship Portuguese social work was perfectly homogeneous, with all its professionals engaged with assistance-prone intervention and accessories to the state of oppression that affected the country. According to the same author, there were Portuguese social workers who defied praxeological canons and conceived alternatives to the institutionalised models and intervention devices. These social workers, walking a path of rupture with the authoritarian regime in the 1960s, are presented in literature as a minority group actively engaged with an agenda devoted to instilling a paradigm change in Portuguese social work (Amaro, 2009). It was among these actors that community intervention models achieved greater adherence, having participated in the implementation of community development projects throughout the country (Amaro, 2009; Branco and Fernandes, 2005; Martins, 2002). As we have mentioned previously, the earliest phase of professional and academic institutionalisation of Portuguese social work was unmistakably coupled with the Estado Novo’s political and ideological project; however, in the 1960s, some ‘pockets of resistance’ to conservative intervention practices surfaced among the new generations of social workers and students who were politically active and already engaged in civic participation and with left-wing anti-dictatorship organisations (Ferreira, 2004; Gorjão, 2002). As a paradigm of such participation, Martins (2002) highlights the involvement of social workers in movements like the women’s catholic progressive GRAAL, in cooperatives such as Pragma (Cooperative of Cultural Diffusion and Community Action, based in Lisbon) or Confronto (Porto), in the GEDOC (self-claimed anti-fascist catholic group), or collaborating in the production and dissemination of subversive actions against the regime and the colonial war (Lopes, 2007). ¹⁰ There are also cases of social workers’ involvement in left-wing clandestine organisations carrying out actions of armed resistance. ¹¹ Last, in the elections of 1969 and 1973, the opposition lists include social workers as candidates for the National Assembly. ¹² Underpinning this political militancy and activism, so often interfering in professional practices, as the dynamics of community intervention show in the final years of the 1960s and early 1970s, we must not forget the influence of the Latin-American reconceptualisation movement (Amaro, 2009; Branco, 2009; Freitas and Santos, 1998; Marques and Mouro, 2004; Martins, 2002; Semblano, 2003), whose echoes dimly reached the Portuguese social work milieu.

Social workers in the Revolution

As stated earlier, the Revolution opened a series of opportunities for social workers to distance themselves from a depoliticised palliative intervention and to openly and freely put in practice alternative approaches. Nevertheless, the opportunities offered by the Revolution to these social workers were not restricted to the lifting of the dictatorship’s freedom constraints; they also released the resources, conditions and institutional legitimacy for the implementation of emancipatory community actions, politically inscribed in the progressive agenda of left-wing revolutionary thought.

The echoes of such actions resound, scattered, in contemporary historiography. Downs (1983) took great interest in studying, in-depth, the residents’ commissions and housing occupation movements in the cities of Porto, Lisbon and Setúbal, describing the process as a grass-roots social mobilisation assisted by diverse technical agents, among whom stood social workers. These movements, or urban struggles, as Downs (1983) referred to them, were backed in the field by professional agents of various sorts who acted as technical advisers and power brokers between the population and higher political levels. As such, they constituted one of the best examples of the Revolution’s progressive tone and of the social workers’ participation in revolutionary social mobilisation and community organisation. The participation of social workers in the organisation of residents’ commissions in Lisbon was described by Alves (2001), who examined the case of the collective occupation of municipal dwellings in 1974 and 1975. ¹³ To provide a sense of the breadth of the phenomena, in 1975, in Lisbon alone, Downs (1983) identified 38 occupants’ commissions and 75 residents’ commissions (whether or not part of municipal housing neighbourhoods). The commissions were often organised in working groups assigned to provide solutions to improve housing conditions, to arrange services for infants and the elderly to organise sports, leisure and cultural events, and to promote the associative movement and local participation in decision making and urban planning. As Downs (1983) surmises, the residents’ commissions ‘attempted not only to improve the material conditions of the bairros [neighbourhoods], but also to increase the participation of people in the control of their daily lives’ (pp. 158–9). Social workers were seen as convenient allies and therefore were actively involved in these movements, as Queirós (2013) states in his study of the relationship between Porto’s inner city residents and the state during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. In a series of interviews with professionals, the author tracked the involvement of social workers demonstrating a double-hinged feature in their testimonies: in one sense, when they integrated these processes, the social workers, who were sympathetic with progressive political agendas and alternative libertarian forms of social intervention, grabbed the opportunity to operate accordingly; on the other hand, their participation was envisaged by the social movements as an asset when it came to interceding with the authorities and helping to deal with organisational and bureaucratic issues. ¹⁴

Alongside the agrarian question in the south, the lack of housing and the degradation of living conditions in the shantytowns that soared around the largest urban centres drew the attention of the political powers in 1974 and in subsequent years (Andrade, 1995). ¹⁵ This circumstance led, after 1974, to the development of new social and housing policies, some with a strong community focus, as was the case of the Local Ambulatory Backup Service programme, SAAL (as read in the Portuguese acronym). This was a decentralised service where multi-disciplinary teams, mainly composed of civil engineers and architects, intervened to support local communities in auto-construction projects (Bandeirinha, 2007). Community organisation, the management of resources, financing and legal and technical consultancy were the tasks embraced by the various professionals involved in SAAL and, according to Bandeirinha (2007) and Baía (2012), who studied this programme in several cities, social workers stood out as community organisers and mediators.

Another important feature of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period was the mobilisation of students, especially those in higher education institutions. This was the subject of Oliveira’s (2004), Bebiano’s (2006) and Cardina’s (2008, 2010) attention. The latter two took great interest in the 1960s period, a time of particular interest to us as it nestled embryonic cases of social work student mobilisation in light of the reasons already discussed in this article. When referring to movements of social work students, it is worth mentioning Ribeiro’s (2011) research on the struggles of these students in Portugal and Brazil, alike. Although the author’s attention is focused on the 1980s’ and 1990s’ struggle for larger professional recognition, she introduces contextual elements that might come in handy for our analysis. For instance, it is noticeable that some of the participants in more recent mobilisations had already been engaged with alternative social work experiences and were politically active during the revolutionary period. In this regard, Martins (2009) suggests that the struggle led by social workers in the 1980s for the full recognition of their degrees within the national university system was indeed nurtured by the experiences and conditions laid down by the 1974 Revolution.

The Cultural Dynamisation and Civic Action Campaigns (CDCCA), undertaken in the centre and north of Portugal under military authority between 1974 and 1975, are another example of social workers’ participation. As part of multi-task brigades, alongside soldiers and officers, physicians, nurses, teachers, engineers, agronomists, actors, musicians and others, social workers travelled to pre-chosen destinations, usually rural villages located in remote mountainous areas, to set in place the carefully planned operations focused on diagnosing the needs of the community and developing solutions to counter the most immediate problems (Almeida, 2009). These campaigns, far from being reduced to the diagnosis of the weaknesses and problems that affected the population, were aimed at improving popular participation and promoting direct democratic processes (Silva, 2013), an endeavour that many social workers were eager to embrace. As archival sources reveal (Silva, 2013), the imprint of social work comes to the surface when we identify some of the instruments used in the campaigns, such as the diagnostic device. When entering a hamlet or a village, each brigade would draw a precise map, a thorough social diagnostic of the locale: access to healthcare, schools, health conditions of the population, housing, transportation and so on. Departing from that diagnosis, a series of tasks were assigned to different professionals with the objective of solving immediate problems while developing strategies for community empowerment and organisation.

In a recent study of popular involvement during the 1974 regime change, the participation of social workers in the CDCCA did not escape Varela’s (2014) attention, claiming that they had a significant role within revolutionary grass-roots mobilisation. Such undertaking was clearly pointed out by Semblano (2003) in her analysis of the civic and political participation of social workers that integrated the Institute of School Social Action within the CDCCA campaigns in the Castelo Branco district. ¹⁶ Semblano’s study offers a good example of how the civic participation of social workers could intertwine institutional tasks during that period, thus underlining the political dimension of the intervention. Therefore, it could be said that, in some cases, the Revolution set the tone for paradigm change in social work intervention in Portugal, as Negreiros (1999) had rightly shown. ¹⁷

These contributions allow us to define the contours of the ‘geography’ of social workers’ participation in political and civic actions during the revolutionary period and help identify key case studies. In addition to the already-mentioned CDCCA and the SAAL projects, other cases can supply a lens to reach and track the participation of social workers in the Revolution, namely in the Campaigns of Literacy and Sanitary Education, ¹⁸ in the Medical Service in the Periphery, ¹⁹ in the housing occupation movements and in the political and social intervention organisations. More than mere symbols of the Revolution, these processes and programmes substantiated ground-breaking political and social changes, and, in the case of social workers, they provided an ideal stage to put into practice the approaches to social intervention lined up with what Amaro (2009) called an ‘alternative social work’. Associated with social mobilisation and the emerging political action of the time, many social workers saw an opportunity to give form to community intervention projects that focused on collective empowerment, far-flung from the classical case and group social work methods (Amaro, 2009; Negreiros, 1999). It is in this sense that Branco and Fernandes (2005) speak of a surfacing of innovative practices within Portuguese social work and also of the definition of new fields of intervention, where the support of grass-roots mobilisations and popular associations becomes a major source of attention for those professionals engaged with the already-mentioned view of an alternative social work. According to the same authors, in parallel with this involvement in civic and political action, the curricula of the social work degrees were, by then, being restructured to reflect a more progressive and alternative view of social intervention, one clearly influenced by Marxist input and reinforced by the social sciences as the dominant scientific background for social workers’ education. Coincidentally, as social workers were taking part in organising collective mobilisations across the country, a corporative struggle for a larger academic and scientific recognition of social work education began to thrive from 1974 onwards.

In addition to mapping social workers’ participation in the revolutionary process, it is important to reinterpret the discourses and rhetoric about that involvement. Far from plunging into a historical revisionist process, this reinterpretation exercise is vital in shaping a critical reflection on the political agency of Portuguese social work. It is also pertinent either to avert an over-romanticised portrait of social workers as paladins of the Revolution or to deconstruct present-day aprioristic misconceptions that tend to see their participation as an abnormal experience, where some social workers became engaged in the excesses of an ‘excessive’ time. To undertake a contemporary reading of such revolutionary involvement and drawing from the analysis of the Brazilian 1960s’ and 1970s’ reconceptualization movement, Faleiros (1985) and Iamamoto (1999) offer us an interesting critical framework. The former denounces a hegemonic tendency within social work literature to present the reconceptualisation movement as inseparably tied to popular organisations, a conception that Faleiros thinks is disproportionate and results from lack of critical thought. The latter, though not rebuffing the alternative, politically engaged character of the reconceptualisation movement claims that the role of social workers, especially when working close to grass-roots social mobilisations, was frequently portrayed in terms of a messianic venture. Likewise, Amaro (2009) refers to the Portuguese alternative social work trend that erupted during the revolutionary period as a kind of messianic volunteering, stimulated by the Latin-American reconceptualisation movement that, as already mentioned, had been timidly making its way into Portuguese social work professional and academic milieus since the late 1960s.

Concluding remarks

What was the role of and what impact did the 1974–1975 revolutionary period have on the evolution of social work in Portugal? What influence did it have in the transition from the assistance, palliative and conservative features of Estado Novo’s social work to the 1980s bureaucratic and technocratic patterns? Or, instead, did this alternative trend represent an exceptional, out-of-the-line experience, powerless to influence the incoming generations of social workers and the future development of professional practice? We are not convinced of such; on the contrary, the involvement and political agency of social workers during the revolutionary process had consequences that outlasted that strict time-lapse that demand further inquiry. In addition to the symbolic capital it brought to Portuguese social work, representing a moment of professional emancipation, it had an impact on the structuring of social workers’ academic curricula, on the enrichment of theoretical, praxiological and epistemological debates and also on the configuration of social policies (Negreiros et al., 1992).

Studying how social workers acted during the transition to democracy in Portugal is essential in order to understand the socio-political impact of the profession and also to understand its re-tooling. Our research proposal aspires to fulfil that aim, leaning on the already-available historiography of the evolution of Portuguese social work practices, professional identity and academic education, on archival data mining and on the social memory of the social workers who stood close to collective mobilisations and other projects aligned with the spirit of progressive political action in the years that followed the April 25th Revolution.

As stated earlier, this portion of Portuguese social work history might be useful to expand our understanding of political and social change in the country and the role that social workers played within it. This inquiry may also provide an example for those who study the agency of social workers in similar socio-historical contexts that were subject to transition between totalitarian regimes and democratic systems (such as Spain and Greece), or in countries where social workers have stood in the vanguard of political change, influencing social policy design or participating in intervention projects according to democratic paradigms.

Although focusing particularly on the agency of social workers alongside the revolutionary forces, the discussion of the tensions within the professional community following such involvement must not be neglected. In spite of the 1960s openness to alternative forms of social intervention, in the early 1970s social workers were still highly (de)politicised by four decades of palliative social work, tied to the Estado Novo’s conservative view of social intervention. In this respect, researching the revolutionary involvement of social workers is crucial to understanding how that experience brought up ruptures, not only in terms of intervention paradigms but also in the relationship between professionals. Ultimately, such an inquiry prompts an insight into the discipline’s very own identity production and reproduction processes, focusing on the capability of social workers to articulate with complex structural change and become actors and agents of socio-political transformation.