Building community: university wellfare as an educational policy

Abstract

The Secretariat of University Welfare (SUW), as a management area of the National
University of Avellaneda, has been configured as an area for the creation and
implementation of lines of work linked, on the one hand, to the policies of care from
the promotion and defense of rights and, on the other, to the participation of the
university community as a daily invitation, going through each of the actions, projects
and programs developed. In this way, we propose to conceive welfare as an ambit that
makes it possible to accompany and sustain the educational and work trajectories of
those of us who study and work at the university, a path that is strengthened in the
collective encounter with the unions and the representative groups of the university,
along with a necessary articulation with other management areas, departments and
careers, as well as with public institutions and organizations that inhabit our territory.
In this process, which is guided day by day and acquires meaning in the defense of
the right to higher education, those of us who are part of it as teachers, non teaching
staff, graduates and students of the educational community are involved. In this way,
in this article we propose to characterize the lines of work of the SUW, taking into
account the complex development and the framework built in these years to be able,
in an articulated and interdisciplinary way, to work to house, care for, accompany,
and break down barriers, promote solidarity and camaraderie as values against the
grain of scenarios of social fragmentation. We will also try to give an account of
some reflections about university policy as praxis, problematizing university welfare
as multidimensional and with the power to generate more egalitarian itineraries in
educational and professional trajectories, building community.