Social Work in Chile: Critical History and Genealogy
Events, Ideologies, and Formation (1880-1945)

In times of crisis and transformation, this book invites us to rethink Social Work as a contested field: a signifier in tension, capable of both reproducing the dominant order and subverting it, reactivating its critical, situated, and emancipatory potential. It is not a neutral discipline, but a practice historically shaped by power relations, ideological conflicts, and competing societal projects. It proposes a genealogical-critical reading of Social Work in Chile (1880-1945), conceived as a practice intertwined with the social-colonial question, and analyzes it as a social technology inscribed within the strategies of the modern state: a device for discipline, population management, life administration, and subjectivity production, which delineates the boundaries of the normal, the worthy, and the assistable.