Centenary research

Two research projects have been completed. A project entitled women in the academy received Incentive Grant funding from the Carnegie UK Trust to conduct a study of women in social work education, starting 1 April 2017 - see Centenary Research Notes 2 for a background to the project, its aims and methods. We presented our findings at a seminar on 24 October 2018 and a podcast of the seminar 'Navigating Troubled Waters: Women in social work education in Scotland' was recorded by Iriss.fm. We also published an article: Viviene Cree, Fiona Morrison, Mary Mitchell & Jackie Gulland (2020) Navigating the gendered academy: women in social work academia, Social Work Education, 39:5, 650-664, DOI: 10.1080/02615479.2020.1715934

Meanwhile Special Collections at the university library secured funding from the Wellcome Trust to catalogue the social work/social studies archive. The project was entitled, Advisors, Advocates and Activists: A Century or More of Social Work in Edinburgh. Archivist Jenny Duffy began in December 2018 and led on this project. See https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/socialwork100/

Ideas for future projects:

There are many projects that could potentially be developed from the centenary project, especially once the cataloguing and archiving is complete - research on students, on staff, on supporters, on communities, on practice learning, on professionalisation...

We did some initial work on a follow-up to a research study of north Edinburgh that was first conducted in the late 1950s (see Centenary Research Notes 1). Unfortunately, no-one was available to take this forward at the time - so why not now?

There is also potential for research on international connections - we are well aware that scholars travel; they come to Edinburgh and they travel from Edinburgh to other parts of the world. There are stories to be told about the global nature of social work - how its knowledge emerged, grew and was transported to different contexts, sometimes without due attention to local knowledge and cultures.

If there is anything that YOU are interested in and would like to do research on in relation to our history project, please get in touch! Although the centenary year is over, there are still people working on social work history, including our PhD student Sarah Henning, who is working on a study of the three women directors between 1918 and 1968.