Josh Lown, MSW, PhD

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Community to Community Impact Engine at Northeastern University. My research focuses on … using qualitative, geospatial, and a community-based and participatory action research (CBPR) epistemology. My dissertation attempted to understand the collective and individual impacts of gentrification in East Boston through walking interviews, photovoice, ethnography, and geospatial analysis. My goal is to ground my research in critical theoretical perspectives, including hauntology, postcolonialism, collective efficacy, abolition, and historical materialism. As a social worker,

Manuscripts

Littman, D. M., Hamilton, G., & Lown, J. (in press). Embodied geographic methods. In J. Salvo, & J. Ulmer (Eds.), Routledge resources online – Qualitative research methods. Routledge. [Invited and Peer Reviewed].
Rasmussen, C. & Lown, J. (invited and peer-reviewed). Paradoxes of professionalization: Reflections on building abolitionist social work praxis in the contradictions. In The Routledge International Handbook of Criminal Justice Social Work.
Lown, J. (2023). Informal social control and the endorsement of police legitimacy: A confirmatory factor analysis. Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work, 1(1).
Coley, R.L., Spielvogel, B., Hwang, D., Lown, J., and Teixeira, S. (2022). Did HOPE VI move communities to opportunity? How public housing redevelopment affected neighborhood poverty, racial composition, and resources 1990-2016. Housing Policy Debate.
Flam-Ross, J.M., Lown, J., Pratil, P., White, L. F., Wang, J., Perry, A., Bailer, D., McKenzie, M., Thigpen, A., Newman, R., Lincoln, M., McKinney, T., Bernson, D., & Barocas, J. (2022). Factors associated with opioid-involved overdose among previously incarcerated people in the U.S.: A community engaged narrative review. International Journal of Drug Policy, 100. Advance online publication.
Friedman, M., Bartier, A., Lown, J., & Hopwood, C. J. (2016). The development of a bi-lingual assessment instrument to measure agentic and communal consumer motives in English and French. Frontiers in Psychology, 7(13).

Presentations

Lown, J. (2024). Routes to power and impact: Community-engaged neighborhood research across methods, career stages, and scales. [Roundtable]. Society for Social Work Research. Washington, D.C.
Lown, J. (2024). The necessity of action: Following through on the promise of action in participatory action research. [Roundtable]. Society for Social Work Research. Washington, D.C.
Lown, J. (2023). Using Qualitative Geographic Methods to Understand Embodied Experiences of Place. [Roundtable]. Society for Social Work Research. Phoenix, AZ.
Lown, J. (2023). Considering How Critical and Radical Social Work Can be Used to Address Current Challenges in Today’s Society. [Roundtable]. Society for Social Work Research. Phoenix, AZ.
Lown, J. (2023). Using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis in Tandem with in-Depth Interviews to Understand the Impact of Institutional Discourses of Power on the Decision-Making Processes of Social Workers. [Oral Presentation]. Society for Social Work Research. Phoenix, AZ.
Lown, J. (2022). The Gaze of the Gatekeeper: Understanding the effects of frontline social welfare worker's perceptions of clients who engage in the sex trade [Oral Paper Presentation]. Society for Social Work Research, Washington D.C.
Lown, J., Rasmussen, C., Rao, S., Maglalang, D., and Melendez, D. (2021). …the point is to change it: The limits of critique and the development of emancipatory social work praxis. [Roundtable Presentation]. Society for Social Work Research 2021, Virtual due to Covid-19.
Lown, J. (2021). Collective efficacy and its effect on witnessed violence and neighborhood disorganization [Oral Paper Presentation]. Society for Social Work Research 2021, Virtual due to Covid-19.
Lown, J. (2021) Mechanisms of community control: Informal social control and the activation of formal systems of community control [Poster Presentation]. Society for Social Work Research 2021, Virtual due to Covid-19.
Lown, J. (2024). Language as a weapon: Claiming the ‘right to the city’ through the use of language for Hispanic residents in a gentrifying neighborhood. [Oral Paper]. Urban Affairs Association Conference. New York, NY.
Lown, J. (2023). Specters of gentrification: Hauntology and how residents experience the effects of asymmetrical neighborhood change [Oral Paper]. Urban Affairs Association Conference. Nashville, TN.
Lown, J. (2023). “‘They Didn’t Do This for Us’: Collective Stories of Gentrification Using Photovoice in a Boston Neighborhood,” [Oral Paper]. Society for the Study of Social Problems. Philadelphia, PA.
Lown, J. (2022). Specters of Gentrification: A Community-Lead Discourse on the More-Than-Material Effects of Gentrification. [Oral Presentation]. 30 years of photovoice – Past, present and future, Virtual.
Item description
Item description
Lown, J. (2022). Specters of gentrification: A community-led study of experiences of gentrification in East Boston. [Panel Presentation]. All-In: Co-creating Knowledge for Justice, Santa Cruz, CA.
Lown, J. (2022). Specters of gentrification: A community-led study of experiences of gentrification in East Boston. [Poster Presentation]. All-In: Co-creating Knowledge for Justice, Santa Cruz, CA.