Anti-Poverty Policy in the Obama Administration

Peter B. Edelman is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and co-chair of the Task Force on Poverty for the Center for American Progress. In a career devoted to social thought, social justice, and public policy, Professor Edelman has written extensively on poverty, constitutional law, and children and youth. He is the author of Searching for America’s Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope, and an award-winning Atlantic Monthly article on 1996 welfare reform, entitled “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done.” He is currently chair of the District of Columbia Access to Justice Commission and is board chair of the Public Welfare Foundation at the National Center for Youth Law.
This lecture will be followed by a Panel Discussion with Belen Seara, Executive Director of PUEBLO (People United for Economic Justice Building Leadership Through Organizing); Marcos Vargas, Executive Director of CAUSE (The Central Coast Alliance United for A Sustainable Economy); and Clyde Woods, UCSB Department of Black Studies.

The aim of the Critical Issues program is to stimulate public conversation about long-standing problems of economic and political inequality, widening insecurity, and the policies and politics that helped to bring them about, but also about how we might imagine and shape a different economic future through an equally concerted politics of reform. We plan also to situate the current, potentially transformational moment in politics and political economy within a longer historical tradition of progressive reform.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, Department of Feminist Studies, and the UCSB Women’s Center. For more information contact Alice O’Connor.

hm 2/25/09; jwil 26.ii.09