Marie Flinkfeldt, Jon Symonds & Clara Iversen
Encounters with clients are at the heart of social work practice, and talk and interaction are often described as the ‘backbone’ of what social workers do. It is therefore somewhat surprising that CA, while increasingly used, is not (yet) embraced as the go-to approach for understanding and developing interactional practice in social work.
This, however, has started to change, as the Conversation Analysis and Social Work (CASW) network has actively promoted CA in social work – and social work in CA.
The network started in Liz Stokoe’s kitchen in 2018, and quickly took off with a series of events and collaborations. This included joint analytic work on data from social work supervision meetings that David Wilkins – Professor of social work (Cardiff University) and at the time a ‘non-CA person’ – had collected and was able to share. Eventually, these analyses fed into a special issue on CA in Qualitative Social Work, which was initiated by the network and was edited by Eve Mullins (University of Edinburgh), Steve Kirkwood (University of Edinburgh) and Liz Stokoe (then Loughborough University).
Other activities over the years have included online data sessions (chaired by Sabine Jørgensen, University College South Denmark) and CA workshops and symposia in collaboration with the European Social Work Research Association, which now recognizes the CASW network as a ‘special interest group’ in social work, chaired by Jon Symonds (University of Bristol).
One of the first things the network did was to organize a conference on CA and social work. We wanted to showcase CA to social work researchers and practitioners, and at the same time show CA researchers the value and potential of engaging with the social work field. Since this took place in 2020, the conference was held online, and it turned out to be much more interactive and stimulating than we could have imagined (bear in mind that this was fairly early days of online conferencing!). Liz Stokoe delivered a keynote explaining “why conversation analysis matters for professional practice”, a theme that has run through the network ever since.
The conference turned into a regular event, as the 2020 conference was followed by conferences in 2021 (with a keynote by Charles Antaki, Loughborough University) and 2023 (with a keynote by Juliet Koprowska, University of York). It is now held online every other year, and in November last year, the network hosted the 4th online conference on CA and social work, with about 70 participants from 22 countries. The organizing team – Eve Mullins, Elin Nilsson (Linköping University), and Justin Canty (University of Tasmania) – had put together a fantastic day of talks and data sessions. Marie Flinkfeldt (Uppsala University) delivered a keynote on “The task to ask: Intimate partner violence and how CA can help us understand policy shifts and communicative development in frontline work”, showing how consecutive CA studies of professional practice can identify the interactional details of institutional change.
The network has also organized panels on social work interaction at other CA conferences, such as the Nordic Interdisciplinary Conference on Discourse and Interaction (Nordisco) held in Trondheim in December 2025. At the upcoming ICCA 2026 in Edmonton this summer, the network will organize the panel Conversation analysis and social work: Investigating institutional, cultural and interactional ‘norms’ in action, chaired by Virginia Calabria (Durham University), Clara Iversen (Uppsala University) and Madeleine Wirzén (Linköping University), with nine papers from a range of social work contexts and countries. This is a way for us to build a viable subfield within the CA community, and also attract CA researchers to join us in investigating social work interaction.
Finally, a key issue for the network has been to bridge CA research and social work education. This is important since social work students need to learn how to talk to clients as part of their professional practice. For this reason, social work programs typically feature communication classes and skills training. We believe that such training should be underpinned by empirical research, and that CA research can offer unique insights into how social work is actually done. Being able to see what happens in real encounters with clients is invaluable for students, and helps them prepare for the work they will be doing once they graduate. In order to further encourage the use of CA in social work education, the network is currently putting together an edited collection (to be published by Policy Press next year) on how CA can be used to unpack core concepts in social work.
If you want to read more about the CASW network, join our email list, sign up for events and data sessions, or get in touch with us, you can check out our website.
