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11th Annual Social Work Research Symposium Call for Abstracts

Call for Abstracts (CFP details)

REGISTER HERE: The 11th Annual Research Symposium: Are We There Yet? Engaging Migration/Mobility, Transnationalism and Diasporic Formations in Social Work Research, Education and Practice.

Call for Abstracts: Immigration was pivotal to the emergence of social work as a profession at the turn of the last century. The Settlement Houses were sites where early Social Workers honed their community practice skills. However, these earlier connections and interests have been on the wane due to a variety of factors that include the changing climate within which social work is practiced–such as the rise and decline of the Welfare state, increasing professionalization, and the emergence of the latest phase of capitalist globalization with its reactive and narrow solution orientation in which post-migration practice consideration receive privileged attention. To this point, the current rise in ‘white nationalism’ and racism in politics with its anti-immigrant stance sweeping across a number of countries and their implications on countries such as Canada that on the surface presents as welcoming, yet falls woefully below providing adequate material resources for these populations is of consideration.

This annual symposium is intended as a response to this introspective moment in the discipline. It is envisioned as both an inward look, as we take stock of the state of knowledge in migration and social work and also as a form of looking beyond disciplinary norms to focus on various local and extra-local contexts of migration which do not necessarily manifest in traditional social work service contexts, but which place our current work within macro-political processes of population movements across political borders.