Research Forum

In March 2020, the PANDA-project sent a few bilateral invitations to social work institutions to collect parallel diary data. However, it soon became apparent that several social work research institutions were of great interest in research on social work during and after the pandemic.

As a result, the PANDA project, with the assistance of IASSW, issued a general invitation and brought together an extensive network of international social work researchers. The network, consisting of more than 40 social work researchers from 30 different countries, is called the COVID-19 Social Work Research Forum.

The purpose of the forum is to promote research on social work during and after the pandemic, to provide opportunities for international research cooperation and to coordinate the activities of the network. A virtual MS Teams platform to organize COVID-19 Social Work Research Forum activities was established in April 2020. The first online meeting of the Forum was held 24th of April, 2020. In social media we use #COVID19SWRF

Joint to the research Forum!

If you are interested in joining the Forum, please, send your request to Professor Timo Harrikari (timo.harrikari@ulapland.fi)

New challenges of social work

The research project is based on Timo Harrikari’s and Pirkko-Liisa Rauhala’s work Towards Glocal Social Work in the Era of Compressed Modernity (Routledge 2019), which analyzed the new challenges of social work in the era of compressed modern era.

The key message of this work is that we have entered a new kind of societal and “glocal” era, where social work faces completely new kinds of large-scale challenges compared to the past.

Global and local challenge

The main factors influencing future social work are the issues of the world planetary scale, rapid changes in the ecological environment, and the questions of survival of mankind that follow from e.g. the unprecedented interdependency of the globe.

The global increase in various natural disasters and human emergencies has long been expected to affect the West, but only the COVID-19 pandemic and the 230,000 deaths from the virus seem to have raised widespread concern among policy makers and citizens.