Grand Challenges for Social Work Doctoral Fellows' Reflections on Knowledge Production and Impact of Social Work Research As Early-Career Scholars

The Grand Challenges for Social Work (GCSW) Doctoral Fellows program has supported three cohorts of social work doctoral students (2023–2025) whose capstone or dissertation research addresses one or more of the 14 Grand Challenges. As the fellows transition into early-career positions, we carry with us not only the specific findings of our capstone/dissertation projects but also a set of evolving commitments and questions about social work's knowledge production. This roundtable creates space for GCSW doctoral fellows to reflect on two themes grounded in our fellowship experience.

The first theme concerns knowledge production in social work. The profession's research output has grown substantially over the past three decades, yet debates persist about what constitutes social work's distinct knowledge base and what questions get prioritized. Fellows will discuss: (a) how our GCSW experience shaped the way we think about generating knowledge, including what it meant to connect a capstone/dissertation project to a Grand Challenge, (b) how we positioned our work across disciplinary boundaries, (c) what we learned about the kinds of research questions that receive institutional support versus those that emerge from community need, and (d) how the current funding environment shapes whether and how GCSW-aligned research gets sustained beyond the fellowship.

The second theme concerns the impact of social work knowledge. The GCSW fellowship explicitly asked doctoral students to connect our research to the people and communities we work with. Fellows will reflect on what that expectation looked like in practice: whether and how our work reached beyond academic audiences, what barriers we encountered in translating findings into policy or practice recommendations, and how the current environment for social work research supports or constrains early-career scholars who want our scholarship to matter outside the academy. The discussion will also address how the fellowship experience, including its mentoring and networking components, influenced fellows' understanding of what impact means in social work scholarship. The session will close with an audience discussion to build connections among social work researchers committed to producing knowledge that serves communities and the common good.