Florian Lieutaud

Presentation of the thesis project :

In 1978, in Alès, a former mining town in the Gard region of France, La Clède was founded as a private not-for-profit association working in the social and medico-social sector to "welcome, support and integrate socially and professionally disadvantaged or socially excluded people". This sector of activity, which historically stemmed from religious charity and philanthropy, gradually entered the bosom of the welfare state at the beginning of the 20th century to become a genuine public service.
Social (and medico-social) work, and the public and private agents who embody it, are, in short, the institutional intermediary between society and the supernumeraries (Castel, 1995), pursuing the ambitious goal of "reintegrating" the "excluded".
However, there are many tensions running through and stretching the canvas of social work. Today, public policies are widely criticized by social workers, who often see them as little more than a race for profitability and a hunt for deficits, while deploring the drying up of human and financial resources. In a society that sees the integration of its members through work, while at the same time multiplying injunctions to lead a healthy life, the scope of the notion of deviance seems to be continually expanding, as it finds so many hooks among the most precarious.
Backed by a large number of ideals, guiding their action like a mantra (benevolence, empathy...), social workers intend to lead their audiences towards social norms, health, autonomy, citizenship. These vague, malleable notions are nonetheless objectives for social workers, who may be brandishing them in search of professional and moral fulfillment, in return for a heavy emotional commitment that also proves exhausting.
With reference to the work of Robert Castel, the aim of this research may be to gain a different understanding of the problems of practice, in the hope of gaining greater control over them.

Under the direction of Geneviève Zoïa