Poverty Archives - Public Seminar

Podcast

Hit Them in the Pocketbook

May 8, 2023 • by Claire Potter

This book describes a part of the African American civil rights movement that many people don’t know—perhaps because it was run, and the battles were fought, by Black women who saw their activism as an extension of their commitment as mothers....

Economy

Why We Should Worry about Inequality

And why we should take seriously Plato and John Stuart Mill

January 11, 2023 • by David Lay Williams

Plato and Mill respectively propose a variety of measures to achieve their desired degree of economic equality (not precise equality in either case), though both agree (1) that inheritance taxes should play a significant role, and (2) that this equality should be achieved incrementally, rather than all at once, to ...

Higher Ed

Why Should Schools Be Mental Health Care Providers?

A capacious national health system should provide systemic solutions for young people

September 8, 2022 • by Claire Potter

Caring for students’ emotional needs is now an unspoken part of the contract you sign as a university professor. ...

Why Should Schools Be Mental Health Care Providers?

History

How the War on Global Poverty Failed

As economic programs and policies shifted from the nation to the individual, United States development experts made political allies at home but failed the world

August 25, 2021 • by Joanne Meyerowitz

_____ In 1976, Michael Harrington traveled to India, Kenya, and Tanzania to bear witness to global poverty. A prolific author with a prophetic bent, Harrington had risen to fame in 1962 with The Other America, a book that stunned readers with its searing exposé of poverty in the United States, caught ...

Education

Unpaid School Lunch Fees

The Tip of the Homelessness Iceberg

November 14, 2019 • by Yvonne M. Vissing and Diane Nilan

Children with sufficient resources don’t apply for school meal programs. Hungry children for whom free school lunch is the only meal they will receive in a day may forgo it because the socio-emotional costs are too high. Some public schools, like those in Salem, Massachusetts, have a district-wide policy where all children get free meals. ...

Education

How My Social Justice Failed My Family

July 17, 2014 • by Robert L. Reece

I’ve never felt more helpless than when I heard my dad tell me that he was selling the house where I was raised. After using my student loans to help cover the overdue mortgage payments, we were still unable to stave off the inevitable. Facing the prospect of ...

Uncategorized

Don’t Worry… Be Happy!

The dark underside of positive psychology

March 17, 2014 • by Jeremy Safran

Over the last decade the field of positive psychology has become a burgeoning area of research within academic psychology. Well known figures in positive psychology include Martin Seligman (developer of the well known learned helplessness model of depression and past president of the American Psychological Association), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (creator of ...

Uncategorized

Christine’s Story: Poverty and Paperwork

February 27, 2014 • by Ann Neumann

"I was the youngest of nineteen children, born in a cramped city apartment, with the assistance of an undocumented midwife.” So said Christine, the sixty-year-old woman I met five years ago in my capacity as a social worker. Though Christine is a citizen who has lived in the United States ...