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"Morgen, Sandra"
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Stretched Thin
When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act became law in 1996, the architects of welfare reform celebrated what they called the new \"consensus\" on welfare: that cash assistance should be temporary and contingent on recipients' seeking and finding employment. However, assessments about the assumptions and consequences of this radical change to the nation's social safety net were actually far more varied and disputed than the label \"consensus\" suggests.
By examining the varied realities and accountings of welfare restructuring, Stretched Thin looks back at a critical moment of policy change and suggests how welfare policy in the United States can be changed to better address the needs of poor families and the nation. Using ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews with poor families and welfare workers, survey data tracking more than 750 families over two years, and documentary evidence, Sandra Morgen, Joan Acker, and Jill Weigt question the validity of claims that welfare reform has been a success. They show how poor families, welfare workers, and welfare administrators experienced and assessed welfare reform differently based on gender, race, class, and their varying positions of power and control within the welfare state.
The authors document the ways that, despite the dramatic drop in welfare rolls, low-wage jobs and inadequate social supports left many families struggling in poverty. Revealing how the neoliberal principles of a drastically downsized welfare state and individual responsibility for economic survival were implemented through policies and practices of welfare provision and nonprovision, the authors conclude with new recommendations for reforming welfare policy to reduce poverty, promote economic security, and foster shared prosperity.
eBook
Anthropology as White Public Space?
How far has anthropology come in becoming racially inclusive? in this article, we analyze an online survey of anthropology graduate students and faculty of color undertaken by the AAA Commission on Race and Racism in Anthropology. Despite some progress, institutional and attitudinal barriers remain, we use the concept of \"white public space\" to analyze these barriers: departmental labor is divided in ways that assign to faculty and graduate students of color responsibilities that have lower status and rewards than those of their white counterparts. Colorblind racial explanatory practices—discourses that explain away racially unequal institutional practices as being \"not about race\"—are common. We argue that such practices make many anthropology departments feel like whiteowned social and intellectual spaces. We conclude by suggesting steps with which anthropology departments can create more inclusive social spaces that are owned equally by scholars of color and their white peers.
Journal Article
Incipient “commoning” in defense of the public?
This article examines the development of competing forms of fiscal citizenship in Oregon tax-related ballot initiative campaigns between 1970 and 2010. Antitax advocates constructed a “taxpayer identity politics” that positioned a privatized “taxpayer” against representatives of the state, recipients of public services, and public sector unions. In response, a progressive coalition produced an alternative citizen—the “Oregonian,” a socially responsible taxpayer/citizen who supports and defends public services and values a “common good.” “Incipient commoning” emerges as support for “the common good” through discourse about community and belonging that is more and other than, though in relation to, the state. Attention to how “publics” conceive of themselves suggests that concepts like the “the commons” already circulate in the imaginaries and vocabularies of advocates resisting neoliberal policies.
Journal Article
Incipient “commoning” in defense of the public?
This article examines the development of competing forms of fiscal citizenship in Oregon tax-related ballot initiative campaigns between 1970 and 2010. Antitax advocates constructed a “taxpayer identity politics” that positioned a privatized “taxpayer” against representatives of the state, recipients of public services, and public sector unions. In response, a progressive coalition produced an alternative citizen—the “Oregonian,” a socially responsible taxpayer/citizen who supports and defends public services and values a “common good.” “Incipient commoning” emerges as support for “the common good” through discourse about community and belonging that is more and other than, though in relation to, the state. Attention to how “publics” conceive of themselves suggests that concepts like the “the commons” already circulate in the imaginaries and vocabularies of advocates resisting neoliberal policies.
Journal Article
Incipient \commoning\ in defense of the public? Competing varieties of fi scal citizenship in tax- and spending-related direct democracy
This article examines the development of competing forms of fiscal citizenship in Oregon tax-related ballot initiative campaigns between 1970 and 2010. Antitax advocates constructed a \"taxpayer identity politics\" that positioned a privatized \"taxpayer\" against representatives of the state, recipients of public services, and public sector unions. In response, a progressive coalition produced an alternative citizen-the \"Oregonian,\" a socially responsible taxpayer/citizen who supports and defends public services and values a \"common good.\" \"Incipient commoning\" emerges as support for \"the common good\" through discourse about community and belonging that is more and other than, though in relation to, the state. Attention to how \"publics\" conceive of themselves suggests that concepts like the \"the commons\" already circulate in the imaginaries and vocabularies of advocates resisting neoliberal policies.
Journal Article
The Agency of Welfare Workers: Negotiating Devolution, Privatization, and the Meaning of Self-Sufficiency
In this article I examine how the neoliberal agenda of downsizing the state and minimizing its role in regulating the market has shaped welfare policy and the work of welfare provision. Using a study of welfare reform in Oregon, I explore how the enactment of welfare-to-work policies positions workers to negotiate the ideological terrain of welfare reform and the conflicts that privatization and devolution generate in a social welfare context. Self-sufficiency, the professed goal of welfare-to-work programs, is a complex concept, saturated with ideological meaning. Examination of the work of welfare provision provides an opportunity to analyze how workers give meaning to self-sufficiency and construct their work as positive for the families they serve. However, high caseloads, unrealistic agency expectations, and conflicting mandates bear down hard on workers, creating disenchantment with agency policy and undermining workers' ability to meet clients' needs.
Journal Article
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WELFARE \REFORM\: New Perspectives on U.S. Urban Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era
Anthropological research on welfare restructuring differs from most poverty
research conducted by U.S. policy analysts and many other social scientists by
its situating the study of welfare \"reform\" within an examination
of the production of poverty and inequality at the center of the global system
of advanced capitalism. In this review we examine urban poverty and
welfare-state restructuring in relation to the ascent of neoliberalism,
including the rise of market-oriented assumptions about social value,
productivity, and investment that dominate civic life and public policy. We
focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the United States. After a brief
review of four theoretical frameworks that inform ethnographic research on
welfare, we explore five approaches or themes in anthropological studies of
welfare restructuring in the United States: (
a
) the ethnographic
challenge to claims of policy success by documenting an unfolding crisis in
social reproduction for the poor; (
b
) deconstructing the hegemonic
discourse on welfare restructuring and juxtaposing it with the lived realities
of impoverished households; (
c
) contesting and moving beyond the
behaviorism of mainstream poverty research; (
d
) exploring the multiple
perspectives of those differently situated within the welfare-state apparatus;
and (
e
) theorizing the relationship between welfare restructuring and an
eroding social citizenship of the poor. The analysis of gender, race, and, to a
lesser extent, class is central to ethnographic research on welfare-state
restructuring.
Journal Article
Security Disarmed
InSecurity Disarmed, scholars, policy planners, and activists come together to think critically about the human cost of violence and viable alternatives to armed conflict. Arranged in four parts--alternative paradigms of security, cross-national militarization, militarism in the United States, and pedagogical and cultural concerns--the book critically challenges militarization and voices an alternative encompassing vision of human security by analyzing the relationships among gender, race, and militarization.
eBook