Social Work Health Futures Lab

I realize that it has been since April that I have written anything on this Blog and I wish I had some really great excuses. Although, I guess a Global Pandemic is a pretty good excuse but I’ve also been engaged in a few projects. Since my last blog post I have published an article in the Journal of Social Work Education entitled #SocialWorkEducation: A Computational Analysis of Social Work Programs on Twitter and you can find it here. I’ll actually be presenting this at the Society for Social Work Research in January.

I was also fortunate to collaborate with the one and only Jonathan Singer of The Social Work Podcasts on a short article about the analytics of a peer-reviewed blog post as compared to an article, which you can also find here. This is actually part of a larger Peer-Reviewed Blogging effort by Drs. Melanie Sage and Laurel Hitchcock with the Institute for Healthy Engagement and Resilience with Technology. So far the Social Work with Digital Technology blog is just getting started so I’m sure a larger more formal announcement will be made soon.

I was very excited to see my book chapter titled Social Media and Digital Literacies for Nonprofit Educators and Professionals published in the Teaching Nonprofit Management book, edited by Drs. Heather Carpenter and Karabi Bezboruah. This book is essential reading for anyone teaching nonprofit courses, macro social work, and it’s also relevant for practitioners in the field.

One other project that I have been working on for the last decade, and have written about previously on this blog, is related to the Hugs and Kisses Child Sexual Abuse Prevention and Awareness Play that is Virginia’s comprehensive CSA program in kindergarten through fifth grades. I, along with two of my colleagues, were invited to write up an article for Social Work Today about this history of the play and some data that we have collected over the years. You can find this article here.

Perhaps one of the things I am most grateful for in 2020 is the new opportunity to have been selected as a Social Work Health Futures Lab Fellow. This Fellowship is sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, hosted by Portland State University, and lead by Dr. Laura Nissen. More about the Lab can be found at the Social Work Health Futures Lab website. This is an 18-month fellowship where I will receive training in Foresight and Futurist Frameworks. I will be able to collaborate with other Fellows on a number of different projects and develop some of my own ideas as they related to digital and new media literacies in social work. I am really excited about this opportunity and hope I can find the time over the next 18 months to blog more about my activities.