During the 1990s, growing demands to end chronic welfare dependency culminated in the 1996 federal "welfare-to-work" reforms. But regardless of welfare reform, the United States has always been home to a large population of working poor—people who remain poor even when they work and do not receive welfare. In a concentrated effort to address the problems of the working poor, a coalition of community activists and business leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, launched New Hope, an experimental program that boosted employment among the city's poor while reducing poverty and improving children's lives. In Higher Ground, Greg Duncan, Aletha Huston, and Thomas Weisner provide a compelling look at how New Hope can serve as a model for national anti-poverty policies. New Hope was a social contract—not a welfare program—in which participants were required to work a minimum of thirty hours a week in order to be eligible for earnings supplements and health and child care subsidies. All participants had access to career counseling and temporary community service jobs. Drawing on evidence from surveys, public records of employment and earnings, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic observation, Higher Ground tells the story of this ambitious three-year social experiment and evaluates how participants fared relative to a control group. The results were highly encouraging. Poverty rates declined among families that participated in the program. Employment and earnings increased among participants who were not initially working full-time, relative to their counterparts in a control group. For those who had faced just one significant barrier to employment (such as a lack of access to child care or a spotty employment history), these gains lasted years after the program ended. Increased income, combined with New Hope's subsidies for child care and health care, brought marked improvements to the well-being and development of participants' children. Enrollment in child care centers increased, and fewer medical needs went unmet. Children performed better in school and exhibited fewer behavioral problems, and gains were particularly dramatic for boys, who are at the greatest risk for poor academic performance and behavioral disorders. As America takes stock of the successes and shortcomings of the Clinton-era welfare reforms, the authors convincingly demonstrate why New Hope could be a model for state and national policies to assist the working poor. Evidence based and insightfully written, Higher Ground illuminates how policymakers can make work pay for families struggling to escape poverty.
A new term has emerged from the disability movement in the past decade to help change the way we think about neurological disorders: Neurodiversity. ADHD. Dyslexia. Autism. The number of categories of illnesses listed by the American Psychiatric Association has tripled in the past fifty years. With so many people affected by our growing -- culture of disabilities, -- it no longer makes sense to hold on to the deficit-ridden idea of neuropsychological illness. With the sensibility of Oliver Sacks and Kay Redfield Jamison, psychologist Thomas Armstrong offers a revolutionary perspective that reframes many neuropsychological disorders as part of the natural diversity of the human brain rather than as definitive illnesses. Neurodiversity emphasizes their positive dimensions, showing how people with ADHD, bipolar disorder, and other conditions have inherent evolutionary advantages that, matched with the appropriate environment or ecological niche, can help them achieve dignity and wholeness in their lives.
This book introduces multiculturalism and its relationship to education and schooling, while also highlighting current approaches to multicultural education and placing them in a broad comparative and international context. Through a comparative view that is both domestic and international, the book explores ethnicity, race, class, and education (kindergarten through higher education) as they interact to integrate populations, while also serving vested interests and enhancing group identity and status. The authors position multiculturalism as a political and social phenomena that affects and interacts with education and its institutions. To do this, they draw upon international cases as well as the history of segmentation and integration in the United States.
As globalization proceeds at an ever increasing and more unrelenting pace, relations among the world’s religions are taking on both a new visibility and a new urgency. Christian theologians and others intent on innovative formulations in the theology of religions are making interreligious dialogue with non-Christians a priority. One way to promote creative scholarship in this quest is to tap into interdisciplinary resources, and the author of this volume is uniquely qualified to do so since he holds graduate degrees in both theology and cultural anthropology. Refuge in Crestone: A Sanctuary for Interreligious Dialogue elucidates how the praxis of interreligious dialogue, as outlined in key Vatican documents in the Catholic Church, could be better served by attending to the qualitative ethnographic methods of sociocultural anthropology. Because the material, behavioral, and cognitive aspects of dialogue—as revealed in daily life, common social and political action, religious experience, and theological exchange—are embedded in culture, they are amenable to ethnographic analysis. Using the unique, multi-religious Colorado site of Crestone and its environs as a fieldwork “laboratory” and self-described “Refuge for World Truths,” the ethnographic data gleaned from this project exemplify the creative interdisciplinary contributions of anthropology to theologizing. It seeks to demonstrate, using an empirical, multi-religious community as its focus, how anthropology can support interreligious dialogue. The results of such dialogue could not only assist the scholarly community by helping theologians arrive at new formulations in the burgeoning area of the theology of religions, but might also serve the more practical goal of promoting peace—as an alternative to violence—in today’s complex and sorely troubled world.
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