"The end of the beginning”: learning from social work with asylum seekers during the Covid-19 pandemic: Α comparative study

This chapter draws upon learning from qualitative research with social workers providing services to asylum seekers in Northern Greece and Southern Italy during the Covid-19 pandemic. The research team aimed to explore and compare challenges, difficulties, and enabling factors in social work practice with asylum seekers at this time, in the two countries. A parallel chapter (X), based on the same study, provides complementary analysis of 30 interviews with asylum seekers, 15 in each country. The research was prompted by a dearth of qualitative research that explores social work practice with asylum seekers (Field et al., 2021), especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. For now, the tide of media, political and legislative attention relating to the pandemic has receded. However, it is suggested that social workers’ adaptations and responses to the intersecting adversities in this phase remain significant within and beyond the context of social work with asylum seekers and refugees. Interviews of 20 social workers in each country were conducted in the five months preceding March 2021.The research group termed this phase, “the end of the beginning”, because the ‘end’ of the pandemic was unknown. Yet participants were at a stage where they were able to pause, look back and reflect on their navigation of interacting constraints, including personal, professional, systemic, political and moral stresses. Some also looked ahead with expressions of commitment and feelings of uncertainty. Social workers and asylum seekers are inevitably separated by a tangled fence of differences. These relate to roles, journeys, insecurities, relative power and choice. However, some dimensions of the ‘pandemic space’ were shared. To some extent, they were in the same storm, even if on different ‘boats’. The research was a chance to hear what that meant to participants and consider how that may have future and transferable relevance.