The Australian Institute for Social Inclusion and Wellbeing (TAISIW) invites you to a seminar on "Whose knowledge is it anyway? Building disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in social work and social care research" presented by Visiting Scholar, Dr Elaine Sharland.

Monday 22nd February, 2010
10:00am, University Club, Isabella's Function Room

This paper draws on Dr Sharland's work as UK Strategic Adviser for Social Work and Social Care Research, charged with developing recommendations to leading stakeholders for improving capacity for high quality, high impact research generation. Here political, intellectual and professional tensions around disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity have been thrown into sharp relief. Social work is an emerging research discipline in the UK, with institutional recognition and 'pockets of excellence'. It is well embedded in practice (the essence of its claim to distinctiveness), but much less rooted in social science, and has long-standing capacity deficits. Social care, by contrast, is a research field and a field of policy and practice, but has no disciplinary status nor distinctive discipline identity. It is a field with which cognate disciplines, among them social policy, psychology, health economics, and sociology, might engage, contributing social science rigour.