Fifty years ago, Michael Harrington’s surprise bestseller The Other America brought “our invisible poor” out of the shadows and crucially impacted welfare reform. How might it help us face our current crisis of inequality? Join scholars and activists as they explore Harrington’s legacy and as they consider in what ways the landscape of poverty in America has both changed and remained the same.
https://vimeo.com/51231647Participants
Ai-jen Poo
Ai-jen Poo is an activist and the co-founder and director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which brings together domestic workers of Caribbean, Latina, and African descent to organize for “power, respect and fair labor standards” in New York. She is also co-director of Caring Across Generations, a national coalition of 200 organizations, advocating for home care workers and patients. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Open Society Institute Community Fellowship, the Union Square Award, the Leadership for a Changing World Award, the Ernest de Maio Award from the Labor Research Association, the Woman of Vision Award from Ms. Foundation for Women, and the Alston Bannerman Fellowship for Organizers of Color.
Janet Gornick
Janet Gornick is co-author of Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment, and has published academic articles in the American Sociological Review Annual Review of SociologyFeminist EconomicsMonthly Labor ReviewSocial Science Quarterly, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, the Journal of European Social Policy, and the Journal of Policy History. She also publishes her work in more popular venues, such as the American Prospect and Dissent. Her research concerns the effects of social policies on the economic well-being of families, and on gender equality in the labor market. In September 2006, she became Director of the Luxembourg Income Study, a cross-national research center and data archive based in Luxembourg.
Maria Svart
Maria Svart is national director of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). She first joined the DSA a member of the University of Chicago Young Democratic Socialists (YDS) chapter. Her campus activism, through YDS and other student organizations, focused on feminist, environmental, and anti-war issues; immigrant rights; and labor solidarity work. After graduation, Svart worked for seven years in the labor movement with the Service Employees International Union and the Committee of Interns and Residents/SEIU Healthcare. Prior to becoming the DSA’s national director, she served as chair of the New York City DSA local and was elected to the National Political Committee at the 2009 DSA convention.
William Kornblum
William Kornblum is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Chicago and was among the nation’s first Peace Corps volunteers. He co-authored The Uptown Kids, a sociological portrait of teenagers and young adults growing up in high-rise public housing projects. He was also the principal investigator of Project TELL, a longitudinal study of the ways in which home computers can improve the life chances of young people at risk of dropping out of school. In 2005, Kornblum was awarded the Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology from the American Sociological Association.
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