SSWR Awards

SSWR Call for Nominations for 2023 Awards

June 22, 2022

Dear SSWR Members:

One of SSWR’s goals is to provide formal recognition of the significant contributions to social work-relevant research. The SSWR Board of Directors is pleased to announce that the Calls for Nominations for the 2023 SSWR awards are now open. The awards include the Distinguished Career Achievement Award, Aaron Rosen Lecture Award, Book Award for the Best Scholarly Book Published, Excellence in Research Award, Social Policy Researcher Awards, Deborah K. Padgett Early Career Achievement Award, Outstanding Social Work Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Doctoral Fellows Award, We encourage you to take the time to nominate a deserving colleague for a SSWR award.

The SSWR Board continues to deepen its commitment to recognizing and supporting research excellence across various methods, epistemologies, theories, and substantive areas of research. Consequently, we seek to deepen our profession’s commitment to research that both, directly and indirectly, informs anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and socially just practices and policies. This is particularly critical for our profession, as social work is often practiced within systems and structures with still unfolding legacies of oppression, marginalization, and disenfranchisement. Social work knowledge is needed to inform theory, practice and policies that help disrupt these cycles of oppression, rather than reflect and reinforce such structures in our practice or production of research. If we are to challenge and move our profession forward in our social justice mission, our definitions of research rigor must include more explicitly, critically, and rigorously engaging processes of oppression, privilege and power, which indeed shape the lives of all persons, families, and communities.

This year, as you are considering nominees, and your letters of support for nominees, please include the ways in which candidates’ research represents rigorous and critical analysis of the processes of marginalization, privilege, power, colonization, or oppression that are relevant to their substantive area. While one’s research may not explicitly or directly have a social justice focus, we are committed to recognizing, honoring, and elevating research that engages processes and lived experiences tied to race/ethnicity, class/caste, culture, gender and gender presentation, sexuality, ability (among others) that do not reinforce colonialist or essentialist representations of these socially constructed positionalities.

Please be sure to read each call for nominations very carefully, as some requirements and/or criteria may have changed. If you have any questions regarding the nomination process, please contact Kristen Reamy, Membership and Awards Coordinator via email at kristen@sswr.org.

Best regards,

Gina E. Miranda Samuels, PhD
SSWR Awards Committee Chair

Congratulations to SSWR 2022 Awardees! – Download PDF

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