This paper aims to discuss the social work services that some institutions offer to Brazilian highway wanderers, searching to reflect on what they represent in the contemporary social context. This research was accomplished with four managers of help institutions in the state of São Paulo through semi-structured interviews. The data was analyzed using the content analysis technique. The results showed that help services are structured according to State political interests on administration and fixation of these individuals to the social exclusion territories where medical knowledge has a strategic function under these subjectivities. The results indicate the need to enlarge debate around help policies in order to implement a disentailed service of medical knowledge that homogenizes everybody in the social spaces, considering also the history and singularity of the individuals themselves without the impacts of normalization.
Wanderers; Institutional analysis; Social psychology; Social work