Social Forces Revisited is a symposium sponsored jointly by the Wallach Art Gallery and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Two thematic panels followed by a closing, keynote address by Michael Katz, author of Why Don't American Cities Burn?, will explore topics as diverse as the role of social documentary both in the progressive era and the contemporary moment, the history of social work, and how contemporary public policy is shaping the evolution of urban America.
Schedule & Participants
1:00 - 1:30 pm - Welcome and introductory remarks by David R. Jones from Community Service Society
1:30 - 3:00 pm - Session on historical perspectives on social work
Panelists:
- Professor Gertrude Goldberg, Adelphi School of Social Work
- Professor Michael Reisch, University of Maryland, Baltimore
- Ethan Sribnick, Senior Research Associate, Institute for Children, Poverty, & Homelessness
- Professor Daniel Walkowitz, New York University
Moderator:
- Professor Barbara Simon, Columbia University School of Social Work
3:15 - 4:45 pm - Session on documentary photography
Panelists:
- Professor Susie Linfield, New York University
- Professor Maren Stange, Cooper Union
- Professor Terri Weissman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Moderator:
- Professor Elizabeth Hutchinson, Professor of Art History, Columbia University and Barnard College
5:00 - 6:00 pm - Reception at the Wallach Art Gallery
6:00 - 7:00 pm - Keynote Address: "From Underclass to Entrepreneur: New Technologies of Poverty Work in Urban America," Professor Michael Katz, University of Pennsylvania
Katz's lecture stems from work on his new book Why Don't American Cities Burn? published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In the 1980s and 1990s, research and writing on urban poverty were dominated by the idea of "underclass," a euphemism for poor black people in the nation's cities. Underclass was a variant of a pathological model poverty inherent in the centuries' old idea of the undeserving poor - an idea that saw poverty rooted more in behavior than in lack of income and work. Now, the underclass idea is used infrequently. It has been replaced in part by what I ca four new technologies of poverty work. Four distinct if overlapping market-based strands are braided through poverty work: rebuilding markets in inner cities, microfinance, asset-building, and conditional cash transfers. This lecture sketches their emergence.
