SP2 Standing Faculty

Roberta Iversen, associate professor in SP2, is this year’s teaching award recipient among standing faculty. Dr. Iversen uses ethnographic research to better understand and improve welfare and workforce development policy and programs and to extend knowledge about economic mobility, especially in relation to families who are working but still poor.

Dr. Iversen’s ethnographic accounts illuminate what low-income working parents need from secondary schools, job training organizations, businesses and firms, their children’s public schools and public policy in order to earn enough to support their families through work.

Housing policy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and workforce development programs and policy in New Orleans, Seattle, St. Louis, and Philadelphia have been improved by findings from Dr. Iversen’s research.

Dr. Iversen’s earlier book, Jobs Aren’t Enough: Toward a New Economic Mobility for Low-Income Families (2006; Temple University Press) presents new ways to increase the economic mobility of low-income families.

Dr.  Iversen previously collaborated with Frank F. Furstenberg, Zellerbach Family Professor of Sociology and emeritus research associate for the Population Studies Center, on grant-funded “Families in the Middle” research, which was a multi-site examination of how middle-income families in the United States and Canada experienced the recession. One paper from this research (Iversen, Napolitano, & Furstenberg, 2011) is the first qualitative research manuscript to be published in the international journal, Longitudinal and Life Course Studies.

Dr. Iversen is currently working on a book manuscript, Transforming “Work”: What Work Was, Is, and Could Be (draft title). The book, based on qualitative research she has conducted since the 1980s, examines the experiences of individuals and families with labor-market work in relation to changes in the labor market since the 1980s. It concludes with new ideas about how work could be expanded and compensated beyond labor market jobs.

In fall 2011, Dr. Iversen was invited to provide district-level TANF administrators with policy recommendations for TANF policy reauthorization. In 2014, she was named to the inaugural class of Fellows of the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR). From 2013-2018 she served on the Executive Committee of the Mayor’s Shared Prosperity Philadelphia anti-poverty initiative. From 2008-2018, she was associate editor for North America of the international journal, Child and Family Social Work.

SP2 Part-Time Faculty

Jane Abrams, a lecturer in the DSW and MSW programs, is this year’s part-time faculty award recipient. She received her BA in social work from Antioch University, her master’s in social work from Simmons College (now Simmons University), and her doctorate in clinical social work at SP2. Since earning her DSW in 2010, Dr. Abrams has been teaching Social Work Practice and Trauma and Psychodynamic Theory and Clinical Social Work Practice in the MSW program at SP2. She has maintained a private psychotherapy practice in Philadelphia for 25 years.

Her clinical specialties include treating adult trauma survivors and couples and providing clinical supervision. Prior to establishing her practice in Philadelphia, she worked as a senior clinical social worker in Healthcare Associates, an outpatient multidisciplinary practice at Beth Israel Hospital (now Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) in Boston, Massachusetts. As a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, she provided clinical supervision for the MSW staff in the outpatient psychiatry department at Beth Israel. She has recently published articles in Psychoanalytic Social Work and The Clinical Social Work Journal. In 2014, she was chosen to participate in the Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association and is on the faculty of the newly established undergraduate minor in psychoanalytic studies at Penn.