50617 - Welfare States in Practice: Care, Control, and Inequality

Description

This panel examines how welfare states organize service provision and influence social inequalities. Papers explore the interactions among frontline workers, bureaucracies, and policy frameworks in delivering services amid increasing austerity and risk aversion. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, and cross-national research, the panel investigates how states assign responsibility for care, and how this shapes both welfare outcomes and the everyday experiences of those tasked with making systems work. Gender cuts across these analyses: while welfare states can reduce poverty risks for mothers, they also offload caregiving burdens onto women and subject them to punitive forms of surveillance.

Sub Unit

• Welfare State

Presider

• Joya Misra, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Individual Presentations

• American Child Welfare and the Regulation of the Maternal Body: 1950-1985 - Matty Lichtenstein, Florida Atlantic University

• Reducing Poverty for Families with Children: Interrelationships between Gender, Policies, and Culture - Chen-Shuo Hong, National Taiwan University; Joya Misra, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

• Spirals of Care: Resisting Paternalism and Palliation in Housing First Homeless Services - Alexa Damaska, Boston College

• U.S. State Policy Contexts and Caregiving for Older Adults: Evidence from the American Time-Use Survey (2011-2019) - Elise M Parrish, University of Pennsylvania

Session Organizer

• Elisabeth Anderson, New York University Abu Dhabi