Similarly to my ideas for scholarly journals in next decade I want to see new scholarly conferences that promote social work knowledge and research.

The first conference idea is the creation of Canadian Social Welfare Policy Conference. The conference can be part of the CASWE annual conference or separate event that engage social policy educators, scholars, students and everyone who is interested to influence social policy in Canada to pursue social justice and other CASW Code of Ethics values.   The conference will offer a venue where those who are passionate about social policy can share their analyses of existing and proposed social policies through social work critical lenses and provide suggestions for improving social welfare policies using values from Canadian Association of Social Work Code of Ethics.

The second idea is to create a Social Work Distance Education Conference with the aim to share recent developments in social work distance education in Canada and around the world. The conference can be an extension of annual Social Work Distance Education conference in the US or a separate stream of the annual CASWE conference that focuses primarily on social work distance education in Canada and/or around the world.

The third idea is to create a Glocal Social Work Practice Conference that allows social workers across the globe to share ideas on new developments in social work practice in both global and local contexts. The conference will be inclusive and provide an annual or biannual alternative to IASSW conference that is unaffordable to many social workers to attend both virtually and in person. The conference can be hosted at TRU as part of the IDays in March every year. The goal of this conference will be to give voice to social work academics, practitioners, students to share their insights on what should be done to set things right using social work values as their guiding principles for actions in Canada and around the world.

If anyone is interested in joining conference planning committee please let me know and we might be able to start working on these projects sooner!