Click on session name to see speaker’s photo and bio:
Note: this page will be updated as the conference is being developed.
Opening Plenary, Thursday – January 17, 2019, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Continental Ballroom 6, Ballroom Level
Keynote speaker: XinQi Dong, MD, MPH, Rutgers University’s Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research
XinQi Dong, a (former) professor of Medicine, Nursing and Behavioral Sciences at the Rush University Medical Center and the Associate Director of the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging, has been named director of Rutgers University’s Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research (IFH). In addition to the institute directorship, Dong will serve as the inaugural Henry Rutgers Professor of Population Health Sciences. He will begin April 1, 2018. Dong, a renowned population epidemiologist and health services researcher, has been a strong advocate for advancing population health issues in underrepresented communities worldwide. He has leveraged the principles of community-based participatory research to conduct multiple large-scale longitudinal population-based studies in the United States and China aimed to investigate the intersections of violence, resilience and health outcomes. Dong has published extensively on the topics of violence prevention, culture and health disparities, with more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. He is the editor of Elder Abuse: Research, Practice and Policy, a textbook comprising the largest collection of research, practice and policy in the field. In addition, he serves on many editorial boards and is guest editor-in-chief for the Journal of Aging Health and the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences. Currently, Dong is the principle investigator of eight federally-funded grants and also has mentored many trainees and faculties to success.
Opening Plenary Sponsored by:
Boston University, School of Social Work, Council on Social Work Education, New York University, Silver School of Social Work, The University of Texas at Arlington, School of Social Work, University of California, Los Angeles, Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of Georgia, School of Social Work, University of Houston, Graduate College of Social Work, University of Toronto, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work
Opening Reception, Thursday – January 17, 2019, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm
Continental Ballroom 4-5, Ballroom Level
Musical performance by Stanford Wind Queertet
Musical performance Sponsored by:
University of Pittsburgh, School of Social Work
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Presidential Plenary, Saturday – January 19, 2019, 2:45 pm – 3:45 pm
Continental Ballroom 6, Ballroom Level
Keynote Speaker: Angela Davis, PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz
Angela Davis, Feminist & Writer
Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice.
Professor Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley. She also has taught at UCLA, Vassar, Syracuse University the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. Mostly recently she spent fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness – an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program – and of Feminist Studies.
Angela Davis is the author of nine books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In recent years, a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.” She also has conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment. Her recent books include Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete? about the abolition of the prison industrial complex, a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and a collection of essays entitled The Meaning of Freedom. Her most recent book of essays is called Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement will be published in October 2015.
Angela Davis is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.
Like many educators, Professor Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st-century abolitionist movement.
Presidential Plenary Sponsored by:
University of Michigan, School of Social Work and Washington University in St. Louis, George Warren Brown School of Social Work
Presidential Reception, Saturday – January 19, 2019, 6:15 pm – 7:15 pm
Imperial Ballroom, Ballroom Level
Friendly Visitors/Presidential Reception Sponsored by:
University of Denver, Graduate School of Social Work
SSWR and Washington University in St. Louis George Warren Brown School of Social Work Aaron Rosen Lecture, Friday – January 18, 2019, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Continental Ballroom 6, Ballroom Level
Keynote speaker: Craig Winston LeCroy, PhD, Arizona State University
Dr. Craig Winston LeCroy is the Communitas Professor of Social Work, Tucson Campus, School of Social Work, Arizona State University. He also holds an appointments at the University of Arizona in the John & Doris Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences, Family Studies and Human Development division and is a faculty member with the Arizona LEND program (http://azlend.peds.arizona.edu/) at the University of Arizona, College of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, the Zellerbach Visiting Professor at the University of California–Berkeley, and a senior Fulbright specialist. Professor LeCroy has focused his research in the areas of home visitation services, social competence in adolesence, and evidence based practice for social work. In home visitation he has conducted randomized trials of the Healthy Families America program of home visitation, serves on the research to practice committee of Prevent Child Abuse America, and has developed a widely used outcome instrument, The Healthy Families Parenting Inventory, Dr. LeCroy’s work in social competence with youth spans efforts toward implementation of evidence based practice models (See, Handbook of Evidence-based Practice Manuals with Children and Adolescents), juvenile justice with youth, and the development of a primary prevention program for early adolescent females (See, Empowering Adolescent Girls). He is currently developing and evaluating new programs for sexual risk reduction with adolecent females and males. He continues to conduct research on issues related to mental illness and conducted an in-depth study of how parents manage their children’s mental illness (See Parenting Mentally Ill Children) and collected a series of first person accounts of people with mental illness. Dr. LeCroy is the author of 14 books and over 100 articles and book chapters. He was elected Fellow status by the American Psychological Association in 2016 and elected Fellow status by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare in 2017. His web page is: http://craiglecroy.com/
Annual Social Policy Forum, Saturday – January 19, 2019, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Continental Ballroom 6, Ballroom Level
Speaker/presenter: Susan Lambert, University of Chicago
Susan J. Lambert is a Russell Sage Visiting Scholar (2016-17), Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, and co-Director of the Employment Instability, Family Well-Being, and Social Policy Scholars Network (EINet). Lambert received a B.A. summa cum laude in Psychology from Eastern Michigan University, a M.S.W. (Social Program Evaluation) and a Ph.D. in Social Work and Social Science (Organizational Psychology) from the University of Michigan.
Lambert studies how employer practices shape the quality of low-level jobs, the lives of low-paid workers, and inequality in society. The sites for Lambert’s research span both production and non-production industries, including retail, hospitality, financial services, transportation, and manufacturing, and both publicly-held and family-owned firms. Her research includes comparative organizational case-studies and randomized workplace experiments as well as analyses of national data on the prevalence of precarious scheduling practices in today’s U.S. labor market. Lambert just completed a randomized experiment at Gap, Inc., in conjunction with Professor Joan Williams of the University of California Hastings School of Law. The experiment assesses the potential effects of an intervention designed to improve multiple dimensions of employees’ work schedules (schedule stability, predictability, control, and adequacy) on both business and employee outcomes. Her research is supported by grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Ford Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Center for Popular Democracy, and Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Lambert regularly advises policy advocates, labor groups, employers, and government officials on strategies to improve scheduling practices in hourly jobs.
Annual Social Policy Forum Sponsored by:
University of Washington, School of Social Work
Invited Symposium I: Connecting the Dots: Bridging Research and Practice to Prevent Multiple Forms of Violence, Friday – January 18, 2019, 1:45 pm – 3:15 pm
Golden Gate 8, Lobby Level
Speakers/presenters: Alisa Somji, MPH, Abena Asare
Violence in many forms—including community violence, intimate partner violence, and child maltreatment—is a leading cause of injury, disability, and premature death. This session will highlight research on shared risk and protective factors among multiple forms of violence, drawing from “Connecting the Dots: An Overview of the Links Among Multiple Forms of Violence,” a 2014 report by Prevention Institute and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that informed the CDC Division of Violence Prevention’s current five-year strategic vision. Learn about how communities across the country are leveraging research to operationalize efficient and effective solutions to concurrently prevent many types of violence in the first place. Also, engage in a dialogue on how to better bridge research and practice to prevent violence in all of its forms.
Alisha Somji is an associate program manager on Prevention Institute’s injury and trauma prevention team. She applies a public health approach to violence, and supports strategy development to create safe, healthy and thriving communities. Alisha supports cities across the country through the UNITY City Network, and leads PreventConnect web conferences focused on sexual and domestic violence prevention. During her time at Prevention Institute, Alisha has co-authored work on multiple forms of violence, early childhood development and health equity. She holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Toronto.
Abena Asare is a program assistant on Prevention Institute’s injury and trauma prevention team. A recent graduate of Wellesley College, Abena holds a BA in Psychology and Health & Society where she conducted research on how racism impacts birth outcomes and overall health. She is passionate about addressing the historical injustices and determinants of health that contribute to the health inequities present today. Abena supports cities across the country through the Making Connections for Mental Health and Wellbeing Among Men and Boys initiative, and helps assist with PreventConnect web conferences focused on sexual and domestic violence prevention.
Invited Symposium II: Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence, Saturday – January 19, 2019, 9:45 am – 11:15 am
Golden Gate 8, Lobby Level
Speaker/presenter: Leigh Goodmark
For the last thirty years, the United States has relied on the criminal legal system to respond to intimate partner violence. But that system has been ineffective in deterring violence and has had problematic consequences for people subjected to abuse, people who use violence, and their communities. Handling intimate partner violence in the criminal legal system has also contributed to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States. This talk will argue for taking a different path. Rather than continuing to rely on the criminal legal system, the response to intimate partner violence policy should incorporate insights from economic, public health, community, and human rights policies. Decriminalizing domestic violence—deepmphasizing the criminal legal system’s role in responding to intimate partner violence—will enable the United States to develop a multi-faceted policy approach and could be a first step in rethinking our response to violent crime.
Leigh Goodmark is a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Frances King Carey School of Law. Professor Goodmark teaches Family Law, Gender and the Law, and Gender Violence and the Law, and directs the Gender Violence Clinic, a clinic providing direct representation in matters involving intimate partner abuse, sexual assault, trafficking, and other cases involving gender violence. Professor Goodmark’s scholarship focuses on intimate partner violence. She is the author of Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (University of California Press, forthcoming 2018) and A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Legal System (New York University 2012), which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2012. She is the co-editor of Comparative Perspectives on Gender Violence: Lessons from Efforts Worldwide (Oxford 2015). Professor Goodmark’s work on intimate partner violence has also appeared in numerous journals, law reviews, and publications, including Violence Against Women, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the Harvard Journal on Gender and the Law, the Yale Journal on Law and Feminism, and Fusion.net. From 2003 to 2014, Professor Goodmark was on the faculty at the University of Baltimore School of Law, where she served as Director of Clinical Education and Co-director of the Center on Applied Feminism. From 2000 to 2003, Professor Goodmark was the Director of the Children and Domestic Violence Project at the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law. Before joining the Center on Children and the Law, Professor Goodmark represented battered women and children in the District of Columbia in custody, visitation, child support, restraining order, and other civil matters. Professor Goodmark is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School.
Invited Symposium III: Perilous Participation: Research into the Violence Against Transgender People, Saturday – January 19, 2019, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Golden Gate 8, Lobby Level
Speakers/presenters: Rebecca Stotzer, PhD, Jody Herman, Sandy James
Violence against transgender people is common, occurring at structural, societal, interpersonal, and intrapersonal levels, and everything in between. However, research documenting that violence and its correlates has only proliferated in the last 20 years, and violence against people of varying gender identities is a new and emerging area of study, particularly for social work. This session will focus on three main themes to aid social work researchers in their knowledge about, and conceptualization of, violence based on gender identity to assist participants in producing more culturally competent and useful research that benefits the lives of gender minority individuals and communities. First, the speakers will focus on the overall state of the research literature examining the nature and extent of violence against transgender people, as well as some methodological concerns with existing data. Second, the speakers will focus more closely on the 2015 United States Transgender Survey, the largest and most comprehensive nation-wide survey of gender minorities in the world. The findings related to violence against transgender people will be discussed as well as the process of creating and launching such a large-scale survey. Last, speakers will discuss the ongoing challenges related to doing high quality research with gender minorities, with a particular focus on where to find existing quality data, best practices for asking about gender identity, and where social work researchers can advocate for the inclusion of more than male/female options in federal, state, or local data collection efforts.
Rebecca Stotzer, University of Hawaii, Research interests include hate crimes and prejudice motivated violence, sexuality and gender identity, social policy and institutions, oppression and social justice, and intergroup conflict.
Jody L. Herman is a Scholar of Public Policy at the Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Public Administration from The George Washington University. Her research focuses on measures of gender identity in survey research and the prevalence and impacts of discrimination based on gender identity or expression. At the Williams Institute, her work has included the development of trans-inclusive questions for population-based surveys and research on minority stress, health, and suicidality among transgender people, among other topics. Before joining the Williams Institute, Dr. Herman co-authored Injustice at Every Turn, based on the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. More recently, she co-authored The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.
Sandy James (pending)
Brief and Brilliant Session, Saturday – January 19, 2019, 9:45 am – 11:15 am
Continental Ballroom 6, Ballroom Level
Speakers/presenters: Anita Barbee, PhD, Kristie Seelman, PhD, Henrika McCoy, PhD, Mieko Yoshihama, PhD, Jama Shelton, PhD
In this year’s Brief and Brilliant session, leading social work scholars will engage the audience through TedX-style talks using images, story-telling and media. Each speaker will complete the statement “I dream a world…” to share the most important ideas facing social work research and practice.
Brief and Brilliant Session Sponsored by:
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Doctoral Student Session and Luncheon, Saturday – January 19, 2019, 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm
Imperial Ballroom, Ballroom Level
Host: Emma Carpenter, Student Member-at-large to the SSWR Board of Directors and PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Panelists: Doctoral student taskforce members
Join us for the annual doctoral student luncheon! The 2019 Doctoral Student luncheon will be a space for structured networking with fellow doctoral students, learn about opportunities to be involved in SSWR, and meet your doctoral student leaders. This year’s luncheon will focus on leveraging strong peer networks and making space for doctoral student voices in SSWR and in Social Work research more broadly. All students are welcome. Lunch will be provided for doctoral students.
Doctoral Student Session and Luncheon Sponsored by:
University of Pennsylvania, School of Social Policy and Practice
RCDC Roots & Wings Roundtable I: Roots Session Preparing Doctoral Students for Impactful Research through Qualifying/Comprehensive Examinations, Friday – January 18, 2019, 9:45 am – 11:15 am
Golden Gate 8, Lobby Level
Speakers/presenters: Paula Nurius, PhD, Elizabeth Aparicio, PhD, Grace Gowdy, MSW, Julia Henly, PhD, Nancy Hooyman, PhD
Increasingly, social work researchers face an imperative to address the “wicked” multi-level problems and grand challenges of our time. This roundtable discusses how to optimize preparation of our doctoral students to be effective contributors in these scientific pursuits and in translating findings to policy, practice, and/or community impact. This roundtable brings together featured participants and audience members to explore strategies for using qualifying (or comprehensive) exams as a pedagogical tool toward preparing for high impact research careers. Speakers will provide relatively brief comments on the following topics toward a common foundation for a very active Roundtable conversation with the audience.
· Identification of select competencies needed to produce or engage with teams in high impact research in the contemporary research landscape.
· Evaluation of different pedagogical goals and types of PhD examinations with audience consideration of their merits/limitations in preparing for impact-oriented research.
· Review of key findings from a GADE survey focused on the current state of PhD exams vis a vis 1) the purpose, structure, and content of exams and 2) preparation to use scientific evidence in contributing to evidence-based practice and policy that advances social work’s equity and social justice aims for impact science.
· Presentation of examples of how PhD exams can be used to better prepare students to produce rigorous scholarship from both student and faculty perspectives
Paula Nurius, Grace Beals-Ferguson Scholar, Professor, and Associate Dean at the University of Washington School of Social Work brings a long history of experience in doctoral education, including mentoring, doctoral program director, and directorship of an NIMH-funded training program on prevention science prioritizing mental health problems, attentive to translational and transdisciplinary research preparation. She has actively supported research advancement in social work, including serving on the Boards for GADE and SSWR, as well as service on research capacity and emerging scholar SSWR committees since 2010. She is active within her university’s Graduate School in advancing innovative models of interdisciplinary and team science training. Her own research on stress, trauma, and violence focuses on at-risk populations, life course development, prevention, and health and functioning resilience. Current research includes investigating the role of adverse early life experiences in shaping adolescent and young adult psychosocial and physical health and role functioning within a framework of co-occurring risks and protective factors. This work integrates structural, social psychological, and physiological theoretical foundations for ways that stress is experienced and becomes embodied, carrying effects through lifespan development. Dr. Nurius received her joint doctorate in social work and psychology from the University of Michigan where she also received her MA in psychology. She received her MSW from the University of Hawaii. During her graduate training she was awarded an NIMH traineeship award and the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship and Dissertation Grant Awards. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and of the Society for Social Work & Research.
Dr. Elizabeth Aparicio is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health. She is a social worker and member of the SSWR Board of Directors. Dr. Aparicio conducts highly applied, community-engaged research aimed at improving health equity via three interrelated areas: teenage pregnancy prevention and teen parenting intervention, intergenerational child maltreatment prevention, and early childhood intervention. Dr. Aparicio’s current work is focused on feasibility testing a holistic sexual health program for homeless youth in Hawai‘i, co-developing a “two-gen” sexual health intervention with and for foster youth and juvenile justice-involved youth in Maryland, and examining differential outcomes of evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention programs among youth involved with juvenile justice and child welfare systems in Texas. She mentors undergraduate students, graduate students, and community members in research methods and teaches community health engagement and qualitative research methods courses. Follow Dr. Aparicio @LizAparicio22 or her Community THRIVES Lab @commTHRIVESlab.
Margaret (Maggie) Thomas, MSW, is a doctoral candidate at the Boston University School of Social Work. Her research focuses on poverty and deprivation among individuals and families, with particular interests in material hardship and public policy. Prior to joining BU, Maggie practiced social work with LGBTQ youth and families and in the child welfare system. She completed her MSW at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Maggie was a founding fellow with the BUSPH Public Health Post. She is a member of the BUSSW Social Policy Analysis Working Group and a SSWR Doctoral Trainee in Research Communication.
Julia Henly is a Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, where she chairs the PhD program and co-directs the Employment Instability, Family Well-being, and Social Policy Network. Henly is a 2018 Society for Social Work and Research Fellow, a 2016 Interdisciplinary Research Leadership Program Fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a 2016 Distinguished Fellow of the William T. Grant Foundation. She is also a longstanding member of the steering committee of the US/DHHS Administration for Children and Families’ Child Care and Early Education Policy Research Consortium. Henly’s scholarship advances understanding of the economic and caregiving strategies of low-income families, with particular attention to the prevalence and consequences of volatile and unpredictable work schedules, the impact of parental work schedules on children’s care arrangements, and how well child care subsidies and other public benefits serve low-income families. She is currently the principal investigator of a multi-year, mixed-methods study in Illinois and New York that examines how child care subsidy program parameters, provider characteristics and employment circumstances contribute to (in)stability in child care subsidy use; and in turn, how patterns of subsidy use shape low-income families’ access to high quality and stable subsidized arrangements. Henly is also co-PI of a qualitative study in two Chicago neighborhoods that investigates how child care density contributes to parental child care decision making and co-PI of a participatory action research project in Bridgeport CT that investigates how parental labor market experiences impact their children’s daily experiences, including opportunities for participation in early education. Her research on precarious employment, joint with Susan Lambert, includes several survey, field experimental, and qualitative studies of the prevalence and consequences of unpredictable and variable work schedules on worker and family outcomes, with particular focus on low-wage, hourly employment contexts. In other work, Henly has investigated questions related to the contribution of public assistance and informal social support to material hardship and family well-being. Henly’s scholarship has received generous funding from federal government agencies and private foundations and has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, such as Social Service Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, Journal of Marriage and Family, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Social Work Research, Children and Youth Services Review, and Journal of Social Issues, as well as several edited book volumes. Professor Henly received her B.A. in Psychology and Social Work from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her M.S.W. (Policy and Planning) and Ph.D. in Social Work and Social Psychology from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Chicago, she was Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy and Social Research at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Nancy Hooyman is Director of the Doctoral Program, Dean Emeritus and recipient of the Hooyman Professorship of Gerontology at the University of Washington School of Social Work. She is author of 12 books and over 130 articles and chapters. Her books include a widely used text, Social Gerontology: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (10th Editions); Aging Matters: An Introduction to Social Gerontology; Feminist Perspectives on Family care: Policies toward Gender Justice; Taking Care of Older Relatives, one of the first widely used books on family caregiving, and Grief and Loss: Interventions across the Lifespan. She is a frequent presenter on multigenerational policy and practice, gender inequities in family caregiving, feminist gerontology, loss and grief, end-of-life care, and gerontological curricular change. She was co-Principal Investigator of the Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) National Center for Gerontological Social Work Education 2002-2015. She is the recipient of the 2009 CSWE Significant Lifetime Achievement Award in Social Work Education and the 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Gerontology Education in Social Work Education, and was inducted into the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare in 2011, where she currently serves on the Board. She is a Fellow and past-chair of the Social Research Policy and Practice (SRPP) Section of GSA; Past-President of SSWR; and Past-President of the National Association of Deans and Directors of Social Work, and served on the Advisory Boards for all the Hartford Geriatric Social Work Initiatives.
RCDC Roots & Wings Roundtable 2: Fusing Empiricism and Activism: The Role of Social Work Research in Fueling Social Change, Saturday – January 19, 2019, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Golden Gate 8, Lobby Level
Speakers/presenters: Laina Bay-Cheng, PhD, Amy Baker, PhD,Daria Mueller, MSW, Michael Reisch, PhD, Sheila P. Vakharia, MSW
A primary aim of early social work research was to provide empirical evidence of social and material inequalities with the goal of provoking needed change in public opinion, policy, and practice. Despite this original allegiance with activism, social work researchers often experience tension between their commitments to scientific methods and to social change. Ironically, biased notions of objectivity dominate perceptions of empirical rigor and validity. As a result, research operating under a values-neutral pretense is often deemed more credible than explicitly values-driven research. This roundtable will bring together featured participants and audience members to consider the relation between research and activism and its particular ramifications for social work research. Central questions up for discussion will include:
· What is the appropriate (i.e., ethically, socially, intellectually) balance between empiricism and activism?
· How should social work rebut claims that activist or values-driven research is less (or not at all) scientific?
· How are sociopolitical and economic conditions (e.g., denials of fact, corporatization of universities, threats to unions and tenure) affecting social work research and its role in social change efforts?
· How can established social work scholars enable early career researchers’ empirical contributions to social justice?
Laina Bay-Cheng (moderator) is the Associate Dean for Doctoral Programs, PhD Program Director, and Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work. She concentrates her scholarship on the social determinants of young women’s sexual well-being. She combines empirical and critical conceptual analyses to shift attention away from individual-focused models of sexual risk and toward the systemic roots of sexual vulnerability: interlocked gender, class, race, and age-based inequalities and the ideologies that perpetuate them. In her role as PhD Program Director, Dr. Bay-Cheng serves on GADE’s Executive Board and SSWR’s Research Capacity Development Committee. As a scholar, administrator, and mentor, she is committed to research as a means to social change.
Amy Castro Baker is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Castro Baker’s research explores how economic and social policies contribute to gender and race disparities, particularly within housing and lending markets. She is the Co-PI of the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, a city-led guaranteed basic income experiment initiated by Mayor Michael Tubbs and backed by the Economic Security Project. She is also the Principal Investigator of the Working-Class Families, Economic Mobility, and Housing Precarity Initiative, following intergenerational cohorts of immigrants in Jersey City and the South Bronx. In 2017 she and Dr. Amy Hillier co-founded the SexGen Policy lab at the University of Pennsylvania which provides methodological scaffolding and research incubation for community based work situated at the intersection of gender, policy, and the market economy. Prior to her time at Penn, Dr. Castro Baker spent more than a decade working with non-profits and community-based agencies in Philadelphia and New York City.
Daria Mueller is a PhD candidate in Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her dissertation examines the experiences of women, including police interactions and exiting prostitution. Previously, she worked as a public policy advocate in various coalitions combating homelessness and commercial sexual exploitation in Chicago and statewide. She successfully advocated for legislation to increase funding for homeless services and affordable housing, remove the felony charge for prostitution, vacate and seal prostitution criminal records, provide immunity from prosecution for prostituted minors, expand the state’s definition of human trafficking, and grant civil relief for those prostituted and harmed by others. She assisted with studies of youth homelessness and spearheaded efforts to establish a treatment court for women charged with felony prostitution. She also worked with women who were formerly engaged in prostitution to develop leadership and advocacy skills, including the production of Turning a Corner, an award-winning documentary about women’s experiences with prostitution in Chicago.
Michael Reisch is the Daniel Thursz Distinguished Professor of Social Justice at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. He has held faculty and administrative positions at four other major U.S. universities, including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan, and been a visiting professor at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Queensland in Australia. Reisch has written over 30 books and 400 other publications on such topics as poverty, welfare and welfare reform, the history and philosophy of social welfare, social justice and social policy, and the impact of economic globalization on social welfare. He has held leadership positions in national, state, and local advocacy, professional, and social justice organizations, directed and consulted on political campaigns at the federal, state, and local levels in four states, and been honored for his work by the Maryland General Assembly, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and numerous nonprofit organizations, professional associations, and universities.
Sheila P. Vakharia is the Policy Manager of the Office of Academic Engagement for the Drug Policy Alliance. In that role, she helps DPA staff and others understand a range of drug policy issues while also responding to new studies with critiques and analysis. Additionally, she is responsible for cultivating relationships with researchers from a wide range of disciplines aligned with DPA’s policy interests and working to mobilize academics in service of DPA policy campaigns. Dr. Vakharia’s research and teaching interests include harm reduction therapy, drug policy reform, drug user stigma, overdose and overdose prevention, and social work education. She is on Advisory Boards of HAMS Harm Reduction Network and Families for Sensible Drug Policy. She is also a member of the Harm Reduction Therapy Research Group. Dr. Vakharia earned her PhD at Florida International University’s School of Social Work, her MSW from Binghamton University, and a Post-Master’s Certificate in Addictions from New York University.
“Meet the Scientist” Luncheon, Thursday – January 17, 2019, 12:15 pm – 1:30 pm
Union Square 22 Tower 3, 4th Floor
Senior Scholars: Ron Astor, Ph.D., Michael Austin, PhD, Robert Chaskin, PhD, Todd I. Herrenkohl, PhD, Melissa Jonson-Reid, PhD, Kimberly A. Bender, PhD, Ramesh Raghavan, MD, PhD, Stephanie Robert, PhD, Gail Steketee, PhD, Karina Walters, PhD
The Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) will be holding the “Meet the Scientist” Luncheon to be held at the SSWR 23rd Annual Conference in San Francisco, CA. This special session provides a forum for early career scholars and doctoral students to talk and interact with established senior scholars who are leaders in social work research and the Society. Early career scholars and doctoral students will have the opportunity to ask questions about career development, challenges in the field, research initiatives, and where the field might be heading. Each senior scholar will be seated at a table with up to 6 early career scholars and doctoral students.
Ron Avi Astor is the Stein-Wood Professor of School Behavioral Health in the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and USC Rossier School of Education (by courtesy). His work examines the role of the physical, social-organizational and cultural contexts in schools related to different kinds of bullying and school violence (e.g., sexual harassment, cyber bullying, discrimination hate acts, school fights, emotional abuse, weapon use, teacher/child violence). This work documents the ecological influences of the family, community, school and culture on different forms of bullying and school violence. This work has been used in Chile, Kosovo, France, California, and with military connected public schools. Astor’s studies have included tens of thousands of schools and millions of students, teachers, parents and administrators. Over the past 20 years, findings from these studies have been published in more than 200 scholarly manuscripts. Along with his colleague Rami Benbenishty, Astor has developed a school mapping and monitoring procedure that can be used “at scale” regionally and with local students and teachers to generate “grassroots” solutions to safety problems. The findings of these studies have been widely cited in the international media, in the United States, and Israel. Astor has won numerous national research awards from SSWR, American Psychological Association, American Educational Research Association, Military Child Educational Coalition and other research organizations. He has an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College. Astor is a fellow of APA, AERA, and an elected member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. His work has been funded by the Department of Defense Educational Activity, National Institutes of Mental Health, H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, Israeli Ministry of Education, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship, University of Michigan, USC and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Michael J. Austin is Professor of the Graduate School at the School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley. He is the founding director of the Mack Center on Nonprofit and Public Sector Management in the Human Services and currently director of the Bay Area Social Service Consortium comprised of county human service agency directors, deans and directors of university social work programs, and foundation representatives. He is the former editor of Human Service Organizations, the premier social work journal on management, leadership, and governance. He is the former co-chair of the Management and Planning MSW concentration at UC Berkeley and former dean of the school of social work at the University of Pennsylvania. He has received lifetime achievement awards from the research community (Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare), the educator community (Association of Community Organization and Administration), and the practice community (Network for Social Work Management). Professor Austin’s research can be characterized as practice research that focuses on engaging the practice community in the identification of research questions, the process of gaining access to data, shared data interpretation, and shared research dissemination and utilization. Some of the recently published studies include relational contracting between nonprofit and public human service organizations, child welfare case record data-mining, implementation of family stabilization policy initiatives, impact of the Great Recession on public human service organizations, sustainability of pioneering nonprofit human service organizations, and the role of link officers in support of evidence-informed practice. His research features an ongoing interest in the role of managers in guiding organizational change in human service organizations and can be found in over 150 peer reviewed articles and 20 books.
Robert Chaskin is Professor, UNESCO Chair for Inclusive Urbanism, and Deputy Dean for Strategic Initiatives at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. His work focuses primarily on the conceptual foundations and principal strategies of contemporary community intervention in the context of urban poverty. He has written widely on the topics of neighborhood intervention, community capacity building, the dynamics of participatory planning and neighborhood governance, and the role of nonprofit organizations in community development and participatory democracy. Among other projects, he has recently completed work on a multi-year, multi-site study of public housing reform in Chicago, with a particular focus on the emerging mixed-income developments being built in several Chicago neighborhoods on the footprint of former public housing developments. His latest book, Integrating the Inner City: The Promise and Perils of Mixed-Income Public Housing Transformation (with Mark Joseph, University of Chicago Press 2015) received the honorable mention award for the best book in urban affairs from the Urban Affairs Association. He is now completing work on an edited volume that provides a comparative, cross-national analysis of policy and community responses to social exclusion, completing fieldwork for a study on the civic and political engagement of marginalized urban youth in Belfast, Dublin, and London (with support from a European Commission Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship), and launching a study of slum clearance and social housing policy in Mumbai. Professor Chaskin received an MA in anthropology and PhD in sociology from The University of Chicago.
TODD I. HERRENKOHL, PhD is Professor and Marion Elizabeth Blue Professor of Child and Family at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Formerly, he was Professor and Co-Director of the 3DL Partnership at the School of Social Work, University of Washington. His scholarship focuses on the correlates and consequences of child maltreatment, risk and resiliency, and positive youth development. His funded studies and publications examine health-risk behaviors in children exposed to adversity, protective factors that buffer against early risk exposure, and prevention. An international scholar, Dr. Herrenkohl works with policy makers, school and child welfare professionals, and community partners to increase the visibility, application, and sustainability of evidence-based programs and practices in prevention, social emotional learning, and trauma-responsive care.
Kimberly Bender, Ph.D. is a Professor and Associate Dean for Doctoral Education at the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver. Her area of expertise is development and adaptation of interventions to empower young people and prevent adverse experiences. A majority of her work partners with young people experiencing homelessness to understand their experiences and develop interventions to address their needs. She has conducted a series of Youth Participatory Action Research projects in which young people use photography to capture strengths and challenges in their community and advocate for changes to reduce stigma and create opportunities. Aligned with this work, Dr. Bender has used human-centered design thinking, in graduate seminars and through community-hackathons, to partner with young people to gain insights into specific challenges experienced and creatively co-develop solutions to address those challenges. In regard to survey research, Dr. Bender has conducted a five-state multi-site research project with youth experiencing homelessness through shelter, drop-in, and transitional housing services to better understand risk and protective factors in this population. She also serves as principle investigator on a 3-year randomized trial of a mindfulness-based cognitive intervention to prevent victimization and substance among shelter youth funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Bender prioritizes public impact in her work. She is a Public Impact Fellow at DU and has used this training to publicly disseminate her work though establishment of a national co-laboratory (REALYST.org) which brings research findings to decision-makers and service providers. She has also channeled her public impact training into preparing doctoral students to integrate public impact into their scholarly agendas as well as supporting faculty to translate their work through the annual SSWR Brief & Brilliant session. Dr. Bender values community-engagement and mentorship in her scholarship, earning her designation as Public Good Faculty of the Year, Distinguished Scholar Award, as well as several student-nominated awards, including the Excellence in Mentoring Doctoral Students Award and Excellence in Teaching Award at her institution.
Melissa Jonson-Reid, Ralph and Muriel Pumphrey Professor of Social Work at the Brown School at Washington University. Prior to academia, she practiced as a social worker in both a domestic violence counseling organization and as a program administrator in public schools in California operating programs like Foster Youth Services and related services for vulnerable youth. As a researcher, a major focus of her work is understanding how responses to childhood abuse and neglect can be improved to support healthy behavioral, educational and health outcomes. A large part of this work has involved using multi-agency longitudinal administrative data to identify targets of opportunity to leverage existing resources and/or evaluate policy and program efforts. Her work also includes evaluating approaches to maltreatment prevention building on existing home visitation platforms, consultation and evaluation with medical homes for youth in care, and school-linked services.
Ramesh Raghavan is Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the School of Social Work at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. He holds additional appointments as Professor of Health Systems & Policy at the School of Public Health, Professor of Psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and as a member of the core faculty of the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. Before coming to Rutgers, he was at Washington University in St. Louis, appointed in the Brown School, and in the Department of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine. At the Brown School he served as principal investigator and training director of a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded T32 pre- and postdoctoral training program in mental health services research. His prior appointment was as policy director for the National Child Traumatic Stress Network at its National Center housed at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr Raghavan conducts mental health services research on the needs of vulnerable children, with a specific interest in children in the child welfare system. Dr Raghavan has conducted studies on Medicaid managed care (funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [AHRQ]), and on the effects of health insurance instability on mental health service use (funded by the Administration for Children and Families). He has conducted several studies on quality of care, including on the use of public finance mechanisms to promote quality of mental health services (funded by the NIMH), racial/ethnic disparities in Medicaid-funded mental health expenditures for children with histories of maltreatment (funded by NIMH), and on the development of novel risk adjustment mechanisms to better insure the mental health needs of children with emotional disorders (funded by AHRQ). Dr Raghavan is the former chair of NIMH’s Mental Health Services Research review committee (SERV), and serves on the editorial boards of Child Maltreatment, and Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research. In early 2015, he served as Senior Advisor in the Office of the Commissioner, Administration on Children, Youth and Families in the US Department of Health and Human Services, primarily working on the Obama Administration’s psychotropic medication use and childhood trauma initiatives. Dr Raghavan completed medical school at Stanley Medical College, Madras, India, and a psychiatric residency at Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, India, before coming to UCLA. He completed a fellowship in pediatric pain management in the Department of Pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine. He then worked at the UCLA/RAND Center for Adolescent Health Promotion, a joint center between UCLA and the RAND Corporation that undertakes research and policy analysis on issues related to child and adolescent health. He earned a PhD in health services from the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA.
Stephanie A. Robert, M.S.W., Ph.D. is Professor and Director of the School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Robert earned her M.S.W. and her Ph.D. in Social Work and Sociology at the University of Michigan, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the RWJF Health Policy Scholars Program at UC-Berkeley/UCSF. Her research examines how social factors impact health over the life course – research that demonstrates how social policy is health policy. Much of her research has focused on how neighborhood context contributes to health and well-being and to socioeconomic and racial disparities in health, particularly at older ages. At UW-Madison, she is affiliated with a number of centers and institutes, including the Institute for Research on Poverty, Center for Demography and Ecology, Center for Demography of Health and Aging, and the Department of Population Health Sciences. For over a decade she was co-Director of the RWJF Health & Society Scholars Program, training postdoctoral fellows from all fields to conduct inter- and trans-disciplinary population health research and to translate that research into policy and practice. Professor Robert has awards for both her research and her mentoring. She is a “master trainer” with the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN)(funded by the NIH).
Dr. Gail Steketee is Professor at the Boston University School of Social Work and served as Dean from 2005 through 2017. She is a graduate of Harvard University and received her MSW and PhD from Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Her scholarly work has focused on developing and testing treatments for obsessive compulsive (OC) disorder and OC spectrum conditions, focusing on Hoarding Disorder and its treatment over the past 20 years. She has published over 200 articles and chapters, and more than a dozen books on these topics. These include Frost & Steketee’s non-fiction best seller Stuff (Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) and the Oxford Handbook for Hoarding and Acquiring (Oxford, 2014). Her work has been featured in media outlets including the New York Times, New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, and CNN.com. She was President of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies in 2016-17, and is currently Vice-President of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare where she is an elected Fellow. Dr. Steketee has received numerous awards including the Outstanding Career Achievement Award from the International OCD Foundation. She serves on the editorial boards of several journals and frequently lectures and conducts workshops on hoarding and related disorders for professional and public audiences in the U.S. and abroad.
Karina L. Walters, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is the Associate Dean for Research, the Katherine Hall Chambers Scholar, and the Director and Principal Investigator of the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute (IWRI; NIMHD P60MD006909) at the University of Washington. IWRI is one of 16 National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities Comprehensive Centers of Excellence and one of two devoted to American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) research in the country. Dr. Walters has over 20 years of experience in social epidemiological research on the historical, social, and cultural determinants of health among AIAN populations as well as chronic disease prevention research (e.g., HIV, AOD, obesity). Dr. Walters has presented at over 320+ national and international conferences; was an invited speaker for Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series (WALS) at the NIH; and was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Dr. Walters has served as Principal Investigator or Co-I on over 37 National Institute of Health (NIH) grants (13 as PI) from diverse NIH institutes; has mentored over 90 scholars from historically underrepresented populations including 35 AIAN scholars; and has participated in 14 national research training programs for underrepresented ethnic minority scholars. Dr. Walters received her B.A. (sociology) in 1987, her M.S.W. (clinical) in 1990, and her Ph.D. in 1995 all from the University of California, Los Angeles. After serving on faculty as an Assistant and Associate Professor at Columbia University School of Social Work (1995‐2001), she joined the University of Washington faculty in 2001 and became Full Professor in 2011. She has served as Director of the Doctoral Program (2003‐05) and as Associate Dean for Research (since 2012). Prior to her career in academia, Dr. Walters was a community-based psychotherapist and served as Commissioner for the Los Angeles County American Indian Commission.
Invited Journal Editors Workshop I: Publishing Research in Peer-Reviewed, Thursday – January 17, 2019, 3:15 pm – 4:45 pm
Golden Gate 8, Lobby Level
Speakers/presenters: Jeffrey M. Jenson, PhD, Mark E. Courtney, PhD, Bruce E. Thyer, PhD, Kirk A. Foster, PhD
This symposium brings together a panel of editors from four generalist research journals in social work: Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, Research on Social Work Practice, Social Service Review, and Social Work Research. The editors will describe their respective journals, offer guidance on submissions, explain the editorial decision-making process, and advise on the process of creating publishable articles. Time will be provided for questions, comments, and suggestions from the audience and responses from the editors.
Invited Journal Editors Workshop II: Forum on Publishing Qualitative Research, Friday – January 18, 2019, 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Golden Gate 8, Lobby Level
Speakers/presenters: Jane Gilgun, PhD (chair), Sondra Fogel, Ph.D., Karen Staller, PhD, , Susan Robbins, PhD, Rupaleem Bhuyan, PhD, Yoosun Park, PhD, Stephanie Wahab, PhD
This workshop is for conference participants seeking to publish qualitative research and scholarly work in social work journals. The workshop brings together a distinguished panel of editors, former editors, and researchers from four journals: Qualitative Social Work, Affillia, Journal of Social Work Education, and Families in Society. These journals are highly regarded in the profession and share commitments to excellence in social work research and publication.
In this session, the editors describe the aim of their respective journals and the editorial decision-making process. Most important, they will create a discussion with participants about what constitutes a publishable qualitative study that influences practice and policy. Before the session starts, participants will write their questions and comments on 3×5 cards. The chair will collect the cards and and use them to facilitate discussion. In this workshop, the editors contribute to the scholarly development of the participants by building skills related to successful publications.
The editors will discuss several issues, including how to match topics to specific journals, review processes, features of articles they’ve accepted for publication, how to respond to reviewer comments, and how to address the implications of their research for practice and policy.