RESILIENCE AND VULNERABILITY: COMPETING SOCIAL PARADIGMS?
Keywords:
social work, vulnerability, social paradigm, coping, resilience, empowerment, transforming.Abstract
Over the past decades has been developed an extensive debate around a new concept: that of resilience. Through our study we highlight the routes of the resilience impact on social work, în relation to vulnerability. Vulnerability, seen as a key paradigm in social work, is now rivalled by a postmodern approach, which emphasizes the ability of individual, of a group, of community, to cope, to adapt, and to transform. The main route is the one that change a problem focused approach to the one of transformation. From a relatively stable characteristic, as the first specialists believed on this issue, resilience is now addressed through researches that highlight the importance of the context, of the time, age, gender, and cultural experiences, in a multidimensional perspective. As a general feature, developed in different contexts, resilience is studied in these second and third generations of researches, in relation to different target groups and social situations. Despite a major interest now enjoys, resilience remains a complex concept, difficult to be harmonized in a global culture. Along with vulnerability, sometimes in competition with, resilience continues to develop as an important new paradigm in social protection.References
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