Wednesday, 20 February 2013

Justice For Kids

Justice For Kids Biography
Next, Gwendolyn Mink describes the efforts of a group of feminist social policy scholars to intervene in the national debate about “welfare reform” through lobbying, call-in campaigns, ad placements, the development of teach-in materials, and the drafting of alternative legislation. “Our primary message,” writes Mink, “was that caregiving is work, including when it is performed for one's own children and other dependents. We worked to bring the caregiving issue to the welfare debate, and so to expose the race-and class-based double standard behind efforts to strip poor mothers of economic security through stringent welfare requirements such as mandatory work outside the home and time limits.” Following Mink's introduction, we reproduce three primary documents to illustrate the results of their efforts:
(1) the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund's summary of HR 3113, the late Congresswoman Pasty Mink's attempt to offer “a progressive, feminist legislative intervention” in the debates to reauthorize the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF); (2) excerpts of HR 3113, including its main findings; and (3) a position paper, “No Promotion of Marriage in TANF!,” authored by Martha Fineman, Gwendolyn Mink, and Anna Marie Smith, in which they state their opposition to the inclusion of “marriage promotion” language in welfare legislation, “because it violates women's right to shape their own intimate lives, diverts valuable resources, and does nothing to address poverty.”
We end this issue with Cathleen Burnett's essay that highlights the “academic profession as vocation” and illustrates how activism can shape and strengthen one's research agenda. Burnett considers multiple roles when conceptualizing the relationship between research and social action, including academic, volunteer, activist, and applied researcher. She uses her own experiences “to disentangle these roles and illustrate how the academic role can integrate activism and research as a response to one's passion.” Her extensive involvement with a group dedicated to abolishing the death penalty provides the context within which she describes her shift from volunteer to social activist. Further, she highlights how her own social justice research agenda emerged from her service commitments and activism over time. Burnett then explains how her applied research is informing the ongoing debate over capital punishment through its incorporation in legal briefs and post-conviction appeals. Like a number of other authors in this issue, Burnett highlights tensions resulting from the lack of structural support for activist work within the academy. She concludes by arguing that academic-activists be “intentional about the dynamics between teaching, research, and service” in order to “live meaningfully at the intersection of passion and vocation.”
Citation: Joyner, Laurie M., and McCaughan, Edward J. (2003). "Introduction: Applied Research and Social Justice." Social Justice Vol. 30, No. 4: 1-4. Copyright © 2003 Social Justice, ISSN 1043-1578.
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