Professor Kris Clarke
Kris Clarke is Professor of Social Work at the University of Helsinki. Originally from Fresno, California, she is has lived in Finland for over 25 years. Clarke has an interdisciplinary background with degrees in English literature, international politics, and social work. Her career began with nearly a decade of work on the European project AIDS & Mobility, advocating for migrants living with HIV and challenging xenophobic and stigmatizing narratives around sexuality and human behaviour. Her research has evolved from multicultural social work and care in the field of HIV towards themes related to decolonisation, abolitionist social work, and the social memory of HIV/AIDS in Central California. Clarke’s latest book co-authored with Michael Wallengren-Lynch and Michael Yellow Bird, is Decolonising Social Work Education: A Perspective on Memory, Haunting and Critical Hope (Routledge, 2025).
professor Carlene Firmin
I am a Professor of Social Work and Director of the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding at Durham University. I am also Co-Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Social Work, co-convener of a special interest group on Social Work and Adolescents for the European Social Work Research Association, a Global Ashoka Fellow, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a member of the Churchill Fellowship Advisory Council, and an Associate of Strathclyde University’s Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice.
I have researched young people’s experiences of community and group-based violence since 2008 and advocate for comprehensive approaches that keep them safe in public places, schools, and peer groups. I coined the term Contextual Safeguarding in 2015 to describe a vision for improving safeguarding responses to young people at risk of harm beyond their family homes, and since then have overseen a research programme to convert this vision into a conceptual and practice framework, in order to reform safeguarding responses and policy frameworks concerned with extra-familial harm, including child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation and peer-abuse, in the UK and internationally. I am widely published in the area of child welfare including through four books and over 50 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and reports. My book Contextual Safeguarding and Child Protection: Rewriting the Rules won the Routledge Prize for a Sociology Monograph in 2020.
Professor
Vasilios Ioakimidis
Vasilios Ioakimidis is Professor of Social Work at the University of West Attica, Athens, and Chair of the IFSW Global Education Commission. He is also Editor of Critical and Radical Social Work (Policy Press) and has previously served as Co-Editor of The British Journal of Social Work. His research focuses on the historical and political dimensions of social work, exploring the profession’s complicity and resistance within contexts of political conflict, structural violence, and the quest for social justice.
Eric Chui
Professor Eric Wing-hong CHUI serves as the Chair Professor of Social Work and Criminology, Head of the Department of Applied Social Sciences, Co-Director of the Policy Research Centre for Innovation and Technology and Associate Director of the Research Centre for Environmental, Social and Governance Advancement at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). He earned his bachelor’s degree in Social Work from The University of Hong Kong, followed by an MPhil and a PhD in Criminology from the University of Cambridge. Before joining PolyU, Prof. CHUI held academic positions in social work at the University of Exeter (United Kingdom), The University of Queensland (Australia), and The University of Hong Kong. He is currently serving as President of the Hong Kong Association of the Schools of Social Work.