Poverty and Electoral Power

The poverty of the American underclass cannot be overcome by any single strategy. But surely it will not be reduced without new government interventions in education, training, employment, housing, and social welfae. That raises the question of how the electoral power-especially electoral power exercised by the underclass itself-can be mobilized to win new public policies

Delivering Public Assistance: What Does It Mean to Follow the Law?

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is the rare public program that provides direct assistance to families in need. Georgia, like other states, receives block grants to administer TANF. What is the current state of the TANF program in Georgia and is assistance getting to those who need it? Should the state be more proactive in reaching out to those who qualify for assistance? Are there times when qualifying families are unable to access benefits due to administrative hurdles and poor customer service? What recourse do families have if they are not treated fairly by TANF administrators? This panel will ask why Georgia has among the lowest rates of TANF assistance in the country (8% of impoverished families receiving assistance) despite having among the highest rates of poverty (approximately 300,000 families living in poverty)

We Need a Loud and Fractious Poor

This article explores the political consequences of four decades of consistent humiliation of the poor by the most authoritative voices in the land, and offers insights into ways that new movements are creating spaces for poor people’s political voices to surface and become relevant again. Our specific concern is the challenge that the current humiliation regime poses to those who seek to revive radical, disruptive and fractious anti-poverty activism and politics. By humiliation regime, we mean a form of political violence that maltreats those classified popularly and politically as “the poor” by treating them as undeserving of citizenship, rights, public goods or resources, and, importantly, that seeks to delegitimate them as political actors. Our article demonstrates the historical importance of authoritative voices in inspiring political unrest involving poor and working people, charts the depoliticising effects of poverty politics and governance since the 1980s, and highlights the new political possibilities that are surfacing now not just to defeat the very dangerous political forms of Trumpism and the new white nationalism but that seek as well to create something that looks like justice, freedom and equality. We insist on the importance of loud and fractious poor people’s politics and call on scholars to direct attention to the incipient political potentialities of poor people today

Labor History Symposium: Gerald Friedman, Reigniting the Labor Movement

When trade union growth worldwide came to a halt in the 1980s, a wide body of literature appeared on the causes of trade union decline. Since that time an even more substantial number of books and articles have been penned on the possibility of trade union revitalization: which combination of factors might lead to resurgence; what organizational forms are best suited to the new political and economic landscape; which goals, strategies and tactics are most likely to spark a reversal of trade unionism’s fortunes. Gerald Friedman, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts and the US editor of this journal, has contributed impressively to these ongoing debates in his Reigniting the Labor Movement. One of the strengths of this important book is its historical and transnational approach. Friedman skilfully weaves together a century’s worth of data from 16 countries to support his principal argument that strikes hold the key to any understanding of the rise, decline and possible resurgence of the labour movement. Trade unions, he argues, must enhance internal democracy in order to facilitate militancy. An indispensible book for all concerned with the present and future prospects of trade unionism, Reigniting the Labor Movement is here examined by four of the leading authorities on that subject

Poor People’s Politics in East Timor

YesPoor people attempting to claim a share of resources in post-conflict societies seek allies internationally and nationally in attempts to empower their campaigns. In so doing, they mobilize the languages of liberalism, nationalism and local cultural tradition selectively and opportunistically to both justify stances that transgress the strictures of local culture and to cement alliances with more powerful actors. In the case of poor widows in East Timor, the languages of nationalism, ritual, and justice were intermingled in a campaign aimed at both international actors and the national state in a bid to claim a position of status in the post-conflict order

The collapse of intermediate structures?

How can we explain the rise of President Trump and the attraction of his campaign behavior before and since he took office? We argue here that the collapse of ‘intermediate structures’ has been a key factor; that the associations and groups which are building blocks of pluralistic politics have been eroded to such an extent that Trump’s personality politics have been able to take over the political stage

The Linkage Between Neighborhood and Voluntary Association Patterns: a Comparison of Black and White Urban Populations

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68314/2/10.1177_089976407400300201.pd

“Pork pies and vindaloos”: learning for cosmopolitan citizenship

This paper examines Audrey Osler and Hugh Starkey’s 2003 article on cosmopolitan citizenship 14 years after its publication. Since its publication, young people’s disconnection from political life has increasingly become a cause for concern for most, if not all, Western democracies. Specifically, this article examines the implications for young people’s political life in Leicester following a period of local, regional and national political changes. The study has shown how some South Asian young people occupy “outsiders-within” status in Leicester’s “common culture” (and all the sub-cultures that exist within it) and see their ethnic communities from a range of voyeuristic positions. Young South Asian participants in the study have not distanced themselves from the South Asian community entirely, but the way participants have approached narrating their self-identities has not necessarily been forged in, or determined upon, how “Indian” or “Pakistani” identities are conceived by the common culture. Consequently, two questions arise. Firstly, what is the impact of developing cosmopolitan citizenship among young people forging new types of ethnic identities in Leicester? Secondly, what types of educational approaches (formal and informal) would be important to help strengthen young people’s political engagement? The paper concludes that the ongoing challenge for educators is to strengthen mutual understanding between students from different communities and backgrounds by drawing on their lived experience within the caveat of promoting cosmopolitan citizenship

The higher education impact agenda, scientific realism and policy change: the case of electoral integrity in Britain

Pressures have increasingly been put upon social scientists to prove their economic, cultural and social value through ‘impact agendas’ in higher education. There has been little conceptual and empirical discussion of the challenges involved in achieving impact and the dangers of evaluating it, however. This article argues that a critical realist approach to social science can help to identify some of these key challenges and the institutional incompatibilities between impact regimes and university research in free societies. These incompatibilities are brought out through an autobiographical ‘insider-account’ of trying to achieve impact in the field of electoral integrity in Britain. The article argues that there is a more complex relationship between research and the real world which means that the nature of knowledge might change as it becomes known by reflexive agents. Secondly, the researchers are joined into social relations with a variety of actors, including those who might be the object of study in their research. Researchers are often weakly positioned in these relations. Some forms of impact, such as achieving policy change, are therefore exceptionally difficult as they are dependent on other actors. Strategies for trying to achieve impact are drawn out such as collaborating with civil society groups and parliamentarians to lobby for policy change