Elevating PAR in the Social Work Academy: How Can Institutions Meaningfully Embrace Collaborative and Participatory Research?

A growing number of social work scholars are employing and uplifting participatory research methods in their scholarship. Participatory methods, such as participatory action research (PAR), community-based participatory research (CBPR), and critical participatory action research (CPAR), work to partner with individuals and communities impacted by social conditions to work towards changing them (Vaughn & Jacquez, 2020). Participatory work explicitly subverts the historically positivist underpinnings of social work and social science scholarship; the growth of these methods suggest a shift in the social work field toward increasingly critical and community-engaged scholarship (Littman et al., 2023). However, many social work institutions are not prepared to meaningfully embrace participatory research when hiring and conducting tenure and promotion reviews. Such reviews often rely on metrics most aligned with positivist research methods (e.g., amount of funding, number of publications), whereas participatory methods are guided by slow, intentional, and non-linear collaborations and likely to result in different dissemination methods (e.g., community reports, community presentations, policy advocacy, social change). At SSWR 2023, our co-presenter team hosted a roundtable to discuss these tensions, which was attended by social work scholars across career stages and geographic locales. We gathered systematic notes during this conversation, which we analyzed alongside our own lived experiences, to write a manuscript titled Navigating, subverting, and replacing conventional academic structures and expectations to co-create with participatory action research (PAR) teams: where to for PAR scholarship?. We suggest several recommendations around areas of growth for social work institutions in meaningfully embracing PAR, including: (1) Offer credit to PhD students for spending time in community; (2) Offer PAR courses & workshops; (3) Develop & revise existing PAR scholarship awards; (4) Align funding with PAR principles; (5) Educate IRBs on PAR methods and ethics; (5) Revise annual and promotional faculty reviews. This proposed 2025 roundtable continues these conversations with an aim towards catalyzing social work institutions towards systemic change. We will begin by sharing the implications from our paper, as well as a printed infographic that highlights these recommendations and suggestions. To introduce attendees to our respective work, each co-presenter will share an artifact of impact: artifacts which display the impact of our work which is not likely to be captured in conventional academic productivity metrics (e.g., recordings of community partner reflections on impact, policy briefs, art pieces, etc.). Next, we will then invite attendees to engage with these recommendations in a gallery format. We will paste large posters with each recommendation throughout the room and ask attendees to document: (a) existing resources and strategies in these areas, and (b) ideas for furthering these recommendations. With attendee consent, we will take photos of these posters to transcribe and share with social work institutions. We will end our roundtable inviting attendees to share their own artifacts of impact, as well as hopes for the possibilities of what social work academia could look like. Finally, we will invite attendees to a PAR special interest group (SIG) to continue these conversations.