New issue "Social Passages" - Journal for Social Work Empiricism and Theory

Narratives are present in many ways in everyday social education and social work: addressees, for example, tell stories about their life situation, and professionals tell stories about individual situations for reflection. Case histories are also of central importance in the practice of research and further education, and narratives are developed in political debates in order to establish particular perspectives on a problem.

Systematically, however, narratives have hardly become the focus of social pedagogical discourse and research. Only two striking exceptions can be found: On the one hand, life stories are collected and analyzed in biographical research and casuistry of social pedagogical research on addressees, users, and actors, in professionalization research, and in historical research. This corresponds, on the other hand, with a high interest in questions of qualitative-reconstructive as well as ethnographic research, which in this respect offers different methodological concepts and methodological approaches to narratives.

Furthermore, in order to show in a broader framework the high importance of narratives for social work and social pedagogy, the current "Blickpunkt" of the Social Passages presents various possibilities of opening up narratives not only in empirical research, but also in a more fundamental theoretical way and in connection with the very far-reaching interdisciplinary research landscape (see in detail the intro to the "Blickpunkt" by Bernd Dollinger and Werner Thole).

Therefore, the editorial board of Social Passages is very pleased to have succeeded in compiling a "Blickpunkt" on the topic of narratives for this issue, in which deliberately heterogeneous references to and work with narratives become clear.

You can find the link to the journal here.