ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on ethics and politics of representation in a PhD project on Swedish social workers giving support to undocumented migrants. It discusses the balancing act of representing social workers as complex actors, neither ‘doing good’ nor only being repressive. In a Swedish context, social workers are often associated with neutrality and a supposedly ‘good’ welfare state. The analytical choices made when representing the individual social workers in the analysis, and especially the decision to present the research participants using their professional titles, might have added to the idea of the ‘neutral social worker’. However, this also facilitated reflection on institutional conditions and the limits set by ideas of ‘professionalism’. The ambivalent relation between social work and activist ideals of social transformation was also highlighted through the analytical framework, which focused on practices. The chapter identifies a tension between social transformation and everyday practice that often was difficult to communicate to some audiences. It is argued that the methodological dilemmas and the tensions in terms of representations and varying expectations from different audiences actually were fundamental for bringing the analysis forward.
