The European Social Work Research Association Conference 2026 will take place in Aberdeen, Scotland from 15 - 17 April 2026. We look forward to welcoming you to the city and to Scotland.
The conference theme is Social Work and Interdisciplinary Research: researching and facilitating evidence informed practice and policy.
This theme aligns with the importance of celebrating, enhancing, and promoting social work research to inform professional practice, facilitate policy and enable change at individual, community, and societal levels. Social work research is imagined, practiced, and facilitated within interdisciplinary and trans disciplinary practice, organisational and policy contexts. The recognition of social work’s key role in developing new critical knowledge, supporting co-creation, informing practice, amplifying voices, demanding social justice, and shaping policy is therefore key to the profession, for those with whom it works and for society. To create open, fair, accessible and transformative societies, critical inter- and trans- disciplinarity engagement and research are crucial for our societies and communities, as we wrestle with challenges ranging from macro to micro.
Social work research is being promoted across Europe by professional associations and regulators, with global challenges such as Covid-19, disasters, economic policies such as austerity and individual practice challenges, all demand informed social work professional responses. Bolger (2020) highlights the ongoing challenge of siloed inter-professional education, that differing organisational and professional groups vary in their priorities, perspectives and commitment to the promise of interdisciplinary practice, and these alone do not itself shape the future. Research and informed practice are key, and our proposal seeks to recognise social work’s centrality at the centre of these debates in the past, present and future. To encourage the next generation of social work researchers, we have also included a reduced rate for current students, subject to agreement.
The call for abstracts will be launched on 5 May 2025.