Advancing a Community-Engaged Research Agenda to Address the Grand Challenge of Creating Social Responses to a Changing Environment

The social work profession has seen surging interest in the role social workers play in addressing environmental issues. This is evidenced by the American Academy for Social Work and Social Welfare’s inclusion of “Creating Social Responses to a Changing Environment” as a Grand Challenge for the profession, the Council on Social Work Education adding environmental justice competencies to the 2015 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards, and the three international social work associations’ commitment to promoting sustainable communities and environmentally sensitive development in the Global Agenda. These efforts are reminiscent of social work’s rich tradition of addressing community environmental inequalities spearheaded by progressive social workers at the turn of the 20th century and represent a return to the roots of the social work profession.

Despite these promising developments, social work has substantial room to grow, particularly when it comes to developing community-engaged, empirical literature that examines environmental degradation. Most environmental social work scholarship to date has focused on conceptual contributions, rather than empirically examining environmental problems. Social workers have unique skills that can be leveraged in studies of environmental degradation and its human consequences. Specifically, social workers can bring expertise in community-engaged research designs and a better understanding of the intersections of social and environmental injustices at the community and neighborhood levels. This roundtable discussion will provide several examples of recent scholarship that aim to address this gap and engage roundtable attendees in charting a research agenda for this critical area of work.

A panel of social work researchers will host a conversation that focuses on lessons learned when examining environmental degradation within communities. They will present examples of the use of community-based approaches to environmental research and describe a variety of specific research methods used to study environmental issues. Examples include: (1) the use of participatory research methods to better understand youth perceptions of neighborhood environmental issues and to describe how youth participants became engaged in community action to address environmental issues as part of the research process; (2) the process of using an Advisory Board of poor Kenyans to guide a study on the impacts of environmental problems in local slums and community members’ coping mechanisms; (3) the use of Photovoice as a research and intervention method to engage with communities on issues of ecological justice to initiate grassroots change efforts as they develop their own agendas, create outcome indicators, advocate for system-level changes, and monitor environmental efforts; (4) the development of innovative research on urban microenvironments when social work, engineering, and geography scholars collaborate to identify community environmental problems and priorities; and (5) the use of a realistic evaluation framework in understanding the contexts, mechanisms, and outcomes related to assessing the impact of development projects on two rural Jamaican communities; this approach underscores the need to understand historical and environmental contexts as well as economic and political influences on environmental justice issues. Our goal for this roundtable is to stimulate conversation to promote research about environmental issues and advance the environmental social work subfield.