Contributions of political theory to political analysis in social intervention processes

Abstract

The work presented here focuses mainly on our experience as teachers of the Specialization in social intervention with children, adolescents and young people. Thus, the reflections that we share are doubly determined, on the one hand, because it is a situated reflection derived from a theoretical teaching exercise and, on the other hand, because the analysis tools that we propose are determined by the consideration of the recipients of that experience, State intervention agents with a very marked professional profile. We know that a question that crosses the scenarios of social intervention is the expression of "the political" or how the political becomes one of its most significant determinations. At the same time, the professional intervention itself is permanently questioned by the political: the relations of power and domination -inherent to the problems that mobilize it- strain the professional practice itself. In this sense, an important challenge of the intervention processes is the analysis of the political, for this reason we intend to review some theoretical contributions that allow: characterizing the political by delimiting it from other activities or social practices; distinguish politically relevant facts; and analyze the relations of power and domination that structure the political. We believe that these contributions, taken as a whole and systematically, constitute a possible initial and basic matrix for situated political analysis or political analysis in intervention scenarios.