Doctoral Student Receives Social Work Grand Challenges Fellowship

Sanoop Valappanandi, a doctoral candidate in the FSU College of Social Work, was awarded a fellowship from the Grand Challenges of Social Work program this spring. The fellowship is part of the Grand Challenge’s Futures Project, an initiative that supports research projects that use the lens of futures thinking and foresight-based tools.

“Futures thinking, or foresight, is a structured approach that explores and seeks to anticipate and prepare for future trends, risks and opportunities,” shared Sanoop. “Through the fellowship, I have the opportunity to collectively learn and apply a foresight lens and strategic tools to imagine the future of the Social Work Grand Challenges, particularly the Environmental Grand Challenge—Create Social Responses to a Changing Environment.”

The fellowship builds on a project begun in 2025, led by Dr. John Mathias, principal investigator and an FSU Social Work faculty member, and Robin Titus, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, who conducted fieldwork and facilitated activities with fishing communities in Kerala, India. “We piloted participatory foresight tools with fishing communities affected by climate change,” Sanoop shared.

The research team facilitated collaborative activities that enabled the fishing community to imagine its long-term future. Several participatory, community-engaged foresight tools were utilized to help the fishing community members imagine the long-term future of their community in the context of environmental change, including

• arts-based envisioning approaches,
• storytelling workshops, long-term timeline tools and
• participatory scenario planning.

The project provides the empirical foundation for the development of a community-engaged foresight toolkit and a book chapter that Sanoop will work on with Dr. Mathias and Dr. Leah Prussia, a professor at the College of St. Scholastica. He will also work with a wide network of collaborators from the previous Kerala project, community leaders, local artists, and journalists from Kerleeyam Web, an environmental media platform helping to share community-generated stories and images.

“The community-engaged foresight toolkit will help social workers and researchers adapt these tools for use in their own community contexts,” expounded Sanoop. “The fellowship also strengthens my doctoral research, which focuses on the imagined climate futures of climate frontline communities, such as fishing communities on small islands in India, and how their imagined futures inform and motivate collective action.”

He looks forward to the project deepening his own knowledge while also advancing community-engaged foresight tools and structured training on how to use them in communities.