Session: Tensions in Collaboration: Ethnographic Insights on Co-Creating Social Work Knowledge (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

The theme for the 2025 SSWR conference, Strengthening Social Impact through Collaborative Research, recognizes the many benefits of collaboration for social work research, demanding attention to the political, epistemological, and ethical complexities of collaborative knowledge-making. This conference theme argues that research across disciplinary, professional, and institutional boundaries can help us to better understand complex issues like environmental justice, health equity, and economic inequality, while fostering more equitable partnerships.This panel takes as its central focus collaboration across boundaries, which necessarily involves negotiating tensions--especially given that collaboration is embedded in power hierarchies, even as it seeks to undermine them.

The panelists in this symposium, as ethnographers of social work research and practice, have both actively engaged in and studied collaborative knowledge-making. This symposium draws on presenters' ethnographic engagements with social work practitioners, community organizers, state bureaucrats, healthcare workers, and other frontline professionals to examine the myriad commitments motivating research partnerships, the various tensions complicating day-to-day collaborative endeavors, and their impacts. Across these multi-professional sites we ask: what epistemological, methodological, political, and ethical tensions emerge in the process of collaborative knowledge-making, and with what effects? What kinds of knowledge-production efforts have been privileged in collaboration, and at what cost? How have collaborative efforts contended with the power hierarchies within which they are embedded? Finally, how have our own commitments as social work ethnographic researchers aligned with or diverged from those of our interlocutors in these collaborative partnerships?

We consider how these collaborations are both shaped by and contribute to the political economic conditions of knowledge production (e.g., funding structures, institutional mandates) in social work, health care, and community organizing. These conditions, and the divergent commitments among different collaborators from activists to scientists, can produce tensions related to, for example, timelines, temporalities, and knowledge-outputs, all of which highlight the social hierarchies and power asymmetries at play. Finally, contributors from this panel will share insights about moments when collaboration was intentionally avoided. What do these "negative cases" of collaboration tell us about the limits of collaboration in practice and research? Under what circumstances might ethical social work research and practice actually conflict with collaboration?

The studies in this symposium are situated in sites of collaborative knowledge-making including: social work practitioners collaborating with researchers and state bureaucrats to advance LGBTQ-affirming care in Detroit (Berringer), experiments in localizing social work "practice research" in mainland China (Chen), a randomized controlled trial of a harm reduction-based intervention to prevent overdose (Claypool), a coalition of organizations and policy professionals trying to prevent an undercount in the 2020 US Census (Obertino-Norwood), and community-based advocacy around housing justice (Weiner Davis). Lastly, this symposium invites social work practitioners and researchers pursuing collaborative partnerships to consider the political economies of knowledge production that incentivize particular types of social change (e.g., the RCT), knowledge products (e.g. peer-reviewed scholarship, policy briefs, etc.) and modalities of collaboration (e.g. community advisory boards). In doing so,this symposium encourages careful consideration of the contexts and conditions in which equitable, collaborative partnerships might thrive.