The Social Work Department of the University of Bucharest is pleased to invite submissions for presentations at the Social Work International Conference (SWIC) 2016 to be held in Bucharest on November 3-4.

The conference theme, Envisioning Sustainable Social Work: Empowering Communities and Individuals, seeks to bring together educators, researchers, practitioners, and students from all areas of social science, who can envision a holistic approach to sustainability and its relevance to social work, social welfare and social policy. This holistic approach refers to extending the meaning and scope of sustainability so as to encompass the social, economic, political and environmental contextual factors which shape people’s lives today and impact the lives of future generations.

Thus, the concept of sustainable social work calls for such a holistic approach to social work practice, research and theory, in which people are seen in connection to their physical, economical, political, social, and personal contexts. It is an approach in which the person-in-the-environment paradigm, which has originally underpinned the founding of the social work profession, and continues being the overarching conceptual framework in social work, is restored to its full potential.

Sustainability can only take shape within a critical mind frame. Social workers have the potential to advance grassroots-inspired locally-sensitive critical standpoints to the many strains raised by globalization, unequal development, environmental degradation, human rights violations, increased armed conflicts and other global contemporary phenomena, which contribute, as a whole, to the perpetuation of unequal access to resources and to the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor. At the same time, sustainability goes hand-in-hand with empowerment. It is social work’s mandate to empower communities and individuals to reach for and obtain the life they aspire and enjoy living, while fostering the greater good of future generations.

The goal of the 2016 Social Work International Conference (SWIC) is to contribute to building a knowledge-base that can reflect and support practice, research and theory that are grounded in the holistic approach to sustainability described above.

Find out more here.