Beyond the crisis: practices of resilience and transformation in a system of services for disability in Lombardy

Globally, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has opened up an era of great uncertainty (Morin, 2020). The shift from resilience to transformation becomes a necessity in social work, especially in cases where the usual patterns of action prove inadequate to deal with the problems generated by the crisis. The paper refers to an ongoing research involving social workers and coordinators of disability services in the Lecco District, in Lombardy. Through an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach, the professional practices put in place during the health emergency have become the starting point for a process of systemic reflexivity (Rigamonti, Formenti, 2020), aimed at encouraging the emergence of paradoxes and dilemmas (Mezirow, 1991). The pedagogical devices of research-training (Bove, 2009; Formenti, 2017) were conceived here as intermediate spaces in which the experience of discomfort could become a resource to guide a transformative process of these services.