Between Norm and Gesture: Care Practices in a Painting Workshop within an Institutional Context
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5216/sec.v29.84121Abstract
This article aims to analyze how care is configured in a painting workshop within an institutional context, exploring how artistic practice reconfigures grammars of action in social work. Based on a qualitative, ethnographically inspired investigation conducted over two years of participant observation and informal conversations with staff and users, we examine practices through the lens of care ethics, pragmatic sociology, and Laforgue’s typology. The results highlight three modalities of care: care with others, through co-presence and co-authorship; care for others, linked to the hospitable maintenance of space; and care without others, characterized by ethical restraint, active waiting, and respect for silence and withdrawal. The workshop thus emerges as an ethical-aesthetic device capable of accommodating presences, hesitations, and absences, valuing “work without others” as a discreet yet decisive form of care.
Keywords: care; vulnerability; pragmatic sociology; art; social work.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Sociedade e Cultura
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish in this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain the copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication, the work being simultaneously licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows the sharing of the work with acknowledgment of authorship and of the initial publication in this journal;
- Authors are authorized to enter into additional contracts separately, for non-exclusive distribution of the version of the work published in this journal (eg, publishing in an institutional repository or as a book chapter), with acknowledgment of authorship and of the initial publication in this journal;
- Authors are allowed and encouraged to post and distribute their work online (eg, in institutional repositories or on their personal page) at any point before or during the editorial process, as this can bring productive change as well as increases the impact and the citation of the published work (see O Efeito do Acesso Livre).
