WITHDRAWN: Innovative Methods for Disseminating Social Work Scholarship

Social work scholars often aspire to disseminate their research to larger audiences in order to translate to real world impact. However, tools and skills for dissemination are rarely taught in graduate school (beyond peer review) and are also constantly changing due to new technologies. Our grand challenges, ethics, and the SSWR commitment to translating research findings compels us to reach further than peer-reviewed journals in order to see social work scholarship making a difference in policy, practice, and discourses of social problems. This workshop will teach how research findings, frameworks and scholarship can be disseminated to a larger audience with the goal of impact that transforms other disciplines and reaches communities and stakeholders outside the academy. The focus of all four scholars is around adolescence and youth, along with gender, race, class, and violence issues. The authors will discuss traditional outlets (mainstream news, university presses), technologically driven outlets (twitter, social media, podcasts, YouTube), as well as ways to make data and findings more succinct and impactful (policy briefs, white papers, and public testimony). Workshop leaders include:

A Social Welfare Professor at UCLA who has written several books, had her work on juvenile justice cited in mainstream and social work/criminal justice media, and whose ideas and research has been profiled on YouTube and twitter chats;

An Assistant Professor of Social Work and Director of the SAFElab at Columbia University, who has made great use of social media, blogging and mainstream news media to publicize his work and disseminate findings that identify pathways of trauma and violence on social media among gang-involved youth;

A Professor and Executive Director of the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at the NYU Silver School of Social Work, who launched an interdisciplinary podcast series last year to address the negative perceptions and narratives about Black boys and men, and who also publishes a blog entitled Nerve-us Breakdown to address the stigma of mental illness and treatment in communities of color;

An Institute of Education Sciences Pre-doctoral Fellow at The University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration, author of Decoding College: Stories, Strategies and Struggles of First Generation College Students, and Producer of the Separate and Unequal podcast.

Participants will learn a valuable tools, including: a) the array of outlets (print and on-line) available to publish social work findings; b) how to get your book, articles, findings into “tweetable” soundbites; c) how to give a press, YouTube or other type of media interview; d) the advantages and disadvantages of writing books for impact; and e) how to keep up with new technologies (e.g. social media) for dissemination of research and building collaborations.

The workshop will contribute to the conference theme concerning strategic communications as a dissemination platform essential to solving critical societal problems, including community violence, institutional racism, and generational poverty.