David S. Byers

David S. Byers is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College.

Byers’s research focuses on community and clinical ethics, particularly related to care and allyship in settings of precarity and stigma. His work examines the ethical claims embedded in both informal helping responses and professionalized, clinically oriented care work. In the case of peer-based helping, he studies why and how adolescents and emerging adults support peers facing bias-based bullying and cyberbullying — and why they might not. In the clinical realm, his research explores the ethical frameworks and improvisational tactics of front-line clinicians engaged in "clinical activism" for devalued and stigmatized care work. Across these projects, Byers’s scholarship aims to inform and localize translational research with a critical focus on the ethical experiences of direct care.

Byers has published papers in journals such as Social Service Review, American Psychologist, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, and Aggression, Maltreatment, and Trauma, among others. He has also written guest essays for The New York Times, Slate, and Time related to queer and trans affirmative social work and psychotherapy. Byers completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University’s Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research and was a visitor at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Byers teaches courses in the MSS program on clinical practice and applied ethics, and in the PhD program on research and theory. His work also builds on extensive experience as a clinician and supervisor in community clinics, schools, and research hospitals. He is also chair of the Ethics Track for the CSWE Annual Program Meeting.

Research and Scholarly Interests: Clinical theory, ethics, practice, and research; translational research; LGBTQIA+ studies; psychoanalytic theory; adolescence and emerging adulthood; social identity and intersectionality; restorative justice; social work education; international social work; qualitative methodology