Caroline N. Sharkey

Caroline N. Sharkey (she/they) is a licensed clinical social worker with nearly 30 years of experience as an educator and community-engaged practitioner. Her research centers on collective efficacy, social cohesion, crisis response models, and community embodied frameworks as ways to address the needs of young people in cities to promote at-promise youth paradigms and to mitigate trauma, including community violence, state-sanctioned violence, mass and school mass shootings, and historical trauma. She examines the role of meso/macro-therapeutic interventions, including digital technologies, digital storytelling, socially engaged art, restorative approaches, community-embodied frameworks, and youth civic engagement to foster positive youth development (PYD) and critical youth perspectives. Caroline’s research and practice seek to expand the role of social workers in non-clinical/non-traditional settings. Their research includes youth participatory action research (YPAR), arts-based YPAR, intersectional qualitative research, video ethnocinema, arts-based mixed methods, and emancipatory research methods. Caroline’s work as an educator addresses curriculum violence using culturally responsive and sustaining andragogy/pedagogy and trauma-informed teaching.

For more information visit Caroline Sharkey's website.

Research Interests

Trauma; historical trauma; urbanicity; YPAR; socially engaged art and digital storytelling; restorative justice practices; community violence; mass and school shootings; critical youth perspectives; curriculum violence; anti-racist culturally sustaining pedagogies; trauma-informed teaching.