Beyond the Poverty Paradigm: Social Research and Political Imagination in Two Eras of Progressive Reform

WCPC Seminar April 13, The Current Economic Crises, inequity, and the inadequate concept of poverty

Friday April 13

West Coast Poverty Center (WCPC) Seminar

by ALICE O'CONNOR

Professor of History

University of California, Santa Barbara

Friday, April 13th

Parrington Hall, Forum (Room 309)

3:00 - 4:30 p.m.

ABSTRACT:

The current economic crisis has brought renewed attention to longstanding problems of economic need and insecurity in the United States, even as it underscores the inadequacy of conventional concepts of poverty as frameworks for understanding and dealing with the deepening inequities characteristic of late 20th- and early 21st-century capitalism. So argues historian Alice O'Connor in the lecture she will deliver at the West Coast Poverty Center on April 13th. Recognizing that we are approaching what could be a defining reform moment on par with the New Deal and Great Society, her talk will explore what contemporary scholars and activists can learn from their Progressive-era counterparts, in the hopes of framing the kind of public conversation that the political sphere has proved unable, or unwilling, to sustain: One that begins with a deeper set of questions about what a just economy looks like; one that takes issues of economic inequality and reform, rather than poverty and social uplift, as its central focus; one that challenges and transcends rather than tries to remain within the confines of existing political possibility; and one that draws from the past not in an effort to replicate it but to inform a far more broad-gauged discussion of what a more just economic future would look like and the kinds of policies and politics needed to achieve it.

BIOGRAPHY: Alice O'Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches and writes about poverty and wealth, social and urban policy, and inequality in the U.S. She is the author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (2001); and, most recently, Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up (2007). She is also a co-editor (with Chris Tilly and Lawrence Bobo) of Urban Inequality: Evidence from Four Cities, and co-editor (with Gwendolyn Mink) of Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States: An Encyclopedia, among other publications. Before joining the UCSB faculty, she was a program officer at the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. Her current research focuses on the changing politics and cultural meaning of wealth in the post World War II United States, and the origins of the second Gilded Age.

West Coast Poverty Center (WCPC) wcpc@u.washington.edu 206-616-2858 / 221-3781 wcpc.washington.edu University of Washington Social Work Building #101 & 102 Seattle WA 98105