Special Topics: Social Welfare Politics in the US

This course provides an introduction to core concepts, theories, and debates in social policy, with a focus on the origins and development of US social policies up to today. In doing so, students will gain tools to critically analyze emerging policy responses to multiple crises of the current pandemic, climate change, and contemporary racialized, gendered, capitalism. We will use historical comparative perspectives to highlight distinctive aspects of the US welfare state/system, including its heavy market orientation to addressing human need and life course risks. We will also use critical race and intersectional feminist theories to illuminate how social policies shape, and are shaped by, ideologies of domination, power relations, and institutional inequalities. Readings and interactive class discussions will guide students to connect theoretical frameworks to empirical research and concreate case studies drawn from different policy areas. Throughout the course, we will pay close attention to the interrelations between economic, social, and political change, welfare state restructuring, rising inequality, and the growth of extreme poverty over recent decades in the US. Throughout the semester we will consider future alternatives for US social policy and how students might construct transformative policies informed by social justice and anti-racist principles and practices.

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