Emmanuel Adaranijo

Emmanuel Adaranijo is a social work researcher whose scholarship examines how frontline child welfare caseworkers respond to family material hardship, and how those decisions shape family outcomes. His work is grounded in the view that neglect often reflects poverty and structural inequity rather than individual parental failure, and it increasingly focuses on how automated risk-assessment tools intersect with caseworker discretion and equity for vulnerable families. Adaranijo joins the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work (FIFSW) as a Research Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow (REPF) working with Professor Barbara Fallon from January 2027 to December 2028. Prior to joining FIFSW, he served as a Congressional Fellow in the United States House of Representatives, in the office of Representative Greg Landsman where he worked at the intersection of social policy and federal oversight. A synopsis of the research project he is leading is below:

Beyond Surveillance: Hardship, Caseworker Decision-Making, and Family Outcomes in Ontario’s Child Welfare System

In child welfare systems, poverty is the most consistent predictor of a family’s involvement with child protection services, yet it is rarely treated as a condition to be addressed rather than a circumstance to be documented. When a caseworker encounters a family facing material hardship, the response can either interrupt or accelerate a family’s path toward separation. Increasingly, this discretionary moment is also being reshaped by automated risk-assessment [AI] tools that promise objectivity while raising urgent questions about how algorithmic systems encode existing inequities.

Analyzing data from the Ontario Incidence Study (OIS) of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect, this research examines how organizational context, supervisory culture, and concrete resource availability shape caseworker decision-making when addressing material hardship. It also explores how these conditions interact with race to produce disparate outcomes for Indigenous families and families of color. The research addresses (1) the extent to which organizational context and concrete resources moderate the link between hardship and caseworker response, (2) the mechanisms through which frontline discretion reproduces or mitigates racial disparity, and (3) the conditions under which material hardship is treated as an actionable problem rather than a marker of risk. In doing so, it reframes poverty from a background condition into a site of intervention through collaborative and integrated services, advancing Canada’s commitments to equity and family well-being, and charting a path toward reducing family separation that is driven by poverty rather than maltreatment.