This article addresses Brazilian Social Work as a profession and field of knowledge, emphasizing its intellectual dimension and qualifying it as a particularity in the continental and global realms of Social Work. It points to evidence of this protagonist role, including, the nature of academic papers in Latin American and global events, and the increased number of citations of authors from the field of Social Work in the social and human sciences and the growing demand for graduate study in Social Work from other fields of knowledge. It develops the hypothesis that Social Work as a field of knowledge goes beyond the immediate imperatives of intervention, contributing to the construction of a critical mass, where its intellectual role in the formation of a theoretical and political culture by the Marxist left in Brazil offers a counter position to the dominant hegemony. This dimension maintains a unity with professional exercise, although it makes a distinction between the meaning of Social Work as a field of knowledge and as a profession.
Social Work; Field of knowledge; Profession; Intervention