« All Events

Listening and Learning: A Social Worker’s Research Journey

May 5 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

nspire Research Series @ FSAS

& Social Works! Research & Innovation Talks

 

Listening and Learning: A Social Worker’s Research Journey

 

Chair: Cassandra Simmel

📅 Tuesday, May 5, 2026
🕚 12:00 -13:30
📍 Room: Spatele Amfiteatrului, FSAS

Presentation Overview

This lecture reflects on a career dedicated to advancing child welfare and child mental health through research grounded in both evidence and lived experience. Drawing on years of direct practice and research work across diverse child-serving systems (e.g., child welfare and youth mental health systems), it highlights how careful inquiry can illuminate the complex realities faced by vulnerable children and families. The research emphasizes the critical connections between early adversity, system involvement, policy failures, and long-term mental health outcomes, while also identifying points of resilience and opportunity for meaningful intervention.

Central to this work is a commitment to bridging the gap between research and practice. By collaborating with state and federal policymakers, practitioners, policymakers, and communities, I hope that my work has contributed to more responsive, trauma-informed approaches that prioritize the voices and needs of children. My work has been grounded in promoting child and youth well-being, addressing systemic and policy gaps and failures, and also reducing disparities in child-serving systems.

Ultimately, I hope my body of research is not only about generating knowledge, but about inspiring action. This lecture invites reflection on what is possible when research is used as a tool for advocacy, equity, and hope.

Who Is This Lecture For?

The event is addressed to academic staff, researchers, doctoral students, and students, as well as practitioners, particularly social workers, interested in:

  • the social dimensions of child welfare and youth mental health
  • the impact of early adversity, system involvement, and policy gaps on life trajectories
  • trauma-informed and evidence-based approaches in child-serving systems
  • the connections between research, policy, and practice in addressing social inequalities

About the speaker

Cassandra Simmel is an Associate Professor and Director of the PhD Program at the School of Social Work at Rutgers University. She served as the Founding Director of the MSW Certificate on Promoting Child and Adolescent Well-being (ChAP) and as Interim Co-Director of the Center on Violence Against Women and Children in 2014. Dr. Simmel’s scholarship focuses on adolescents involved with child-serving systems, in particular the child welfare and behavioral health systems. In her research, she seeks to understand adolescents’ complex behavioral health challenges and how such challenges intersect with involvement in child welfare systems. She is further interested in how adolescents navigate involvement with child welfare systems, including during the vulnerable period of departing child welfare oversight and transitioning to adulthood. Her published work has appeared in journals such as Child Maltreatment, Child Abuse and Neglect, Children and Youth Services Review, Child Development, Journal of Public Child Welfare, and Journal of Policy Practice.

Inspire Research Series @ FSAS

At FSAS, we believe that research becomes stronger when ideas and people meet. Inspire Research Series @ FSAS was created as a space for dialogue, reflection, and inspiration, at the intersection of departments, study lines, and generations of researchers, but also as a framework in which research is understood not only as a final performance, but as a living practice that concerns each of us in our identity as academic staff.

Through lectures, discussions, and workshops delivered by distinguished invited speakers – from Romania and from abroad – this series aims to make us more aware of the ways in which we think, write, and share knowledge. It invites us to take a step back – or perhaps sideways – in order to set ourselves in motion within a space of critically examining our own ways of doing research, of deconstructing expectations related to performance, productivity, and “outcomes,” and of reactivating the seeker within us (of data, of meaning), the resilient form of the active researcher. It is an invitation to allow ourselves to be inspired and transformed by the diversity of ways of doing, imagining, and living research – with all its challenges, uncertainties, and satisfactions.

Whether it is about publishing in international journals, about academic writing as a process of thinking, about the ethics and politics of knowledge production, about creative and interdisciplinary methods, about slow research, deep work, social impact and public sociology, about research projects that are desired, ongoing, or only just imaginable, about diverse and pressing themes, or about the ways in which artificial intelligence is transforming academic work, Inspire Research Series aims to create connections and to activate thought. Beyond disciplines, beyond borders, beyond different ways of relating to research, and beyond our own academic trajectories.

 

Details