Since its very foundation, the Department of Social Work has been fostering research on a variety of topics including social work methodology (e.g., working with individuals or groups of people experiencing various types of social disadvantage), management of social work (i.e., training future specialists to work in public service, the private sector and non-profit organisations) and social work in criminal justice. To this day, our department offers a unique focus on social work in criminal justice, social management theory, comparative social welfare systems, social economics and the management of social services, methods of working with at-risk youth as well as with people facing immediate danger (our department hosts a number of psychologists specialising in crisis intervention, systemic psychotherapy, and mass-casualty-incident management).
With the creation of didactic material being one of the most important undertakings of our department, our educators have published (or contributed to the publication of) numerous academic textbooks.
Our department produces professionals with a degree in social work who, joining both Czech and international organisations, go on to cooperate with lawyers, doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists across the Czech Republic to deal with issues related to social work and social welfare. They initiate and organise social-work-related activities in Czechia and Euroregions, in existing institutions as well as incipient ones; they tackle various demanding socio-psychological, legal and administrative issues, e.g., in cases of mass migrations, in times of war and natural disasters; they carry out tasks related to social welfare on state, municipal, and regional levels as well as for NGOs; they work towards the integration of ethnic and religious minorities and marginalized groups, the prevention of juvenile delinquency and criminality, the introduction of so-called alternative punishments; they help prevent and resolve issues associated with alcohol and substance addiction, unemployment, labour migration in border territories; they work with members of minorities via community projects as well as with children and adults without means of support and, naturally, in the penitentiary system and institutional care.
Our study program provides an overview of various value systems. In our view, the guiding values of social work include the highest form of societal solidarity, the growth of the client’s individual potential and respect towards human and civil rights.