Guest For
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER
29,
2008
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GUEST:
(Originally aired: 03-06-08)
FRANCES FOX PIVEN PhD
Professor of
Political Science and Sociology
Graduate
Center - City University of New York
Author:
"Challenging Authority -
How
Ordinary People Change America"
Fox-piven@gc.cuny.edu
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The program can be
viewed in its entirety by clicking the you tube link below:
Frances Fox Piven PhD - Air
date: 03-06-08 -
FRANCES FOX PIVEN PhD
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More about: FRANCES
FOX PIVEN
Biographical Note - Frances Fox
Piven PhD
Widely recognized as one of America's
most thoughtful and provocative commentators on America's social welfare
system, Frances Fox Piven, political scientist, activist, and educator, was
born in Calgary, Alberta in 1932. She came to the U.S. in 1933 and was
naturalized in 1953, the same year she received her B.A. in City Planning
from the University of Chicago. She also received her M.A. (1956) and Ph.D.
(1962) from the University of Chicago. While married to Herman Piven, she
had a daughter, Sarah. After a brief stint in New York as a city planner,
she became a research associate at one of the country's first anti-poverty
agencies, Mobilization for Youth -- a comprehensive, community-based service
organization on New York City's Lower East Side. At its height the
organization coordinated more than fifty experimental programs designed to
reduce poverty and crime. A 1965 paper entitled "Mobilizing the Poor: How It
Can Be Done," launched Piven and her co-author, Columbia University
professor Richard Cloward, into an ongoing national conversation on the
welfare state. Piven and Cloward's collaborative work came to influence both
careers, and the two eventually married. Their early work together provided
a theoretical base for the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), the
first in a long line of grass-roots organizations in which Piven acted as
founder, advisor, and/or planner. Piven taught in the Columbia University
School of Social Work from 1966 to 1972. From 1972 to 1982 she was a
professor of political science at Boston University. In 1982 she joined the
Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has co-authored with
Richard Cloward Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare
(1971); The Politics of Turmoil: Essays on Poverty, Race and the Urban
Crisis (1974); Poor People's Movements (1977); The New Class
War (1982); The Mean Season (1987); Why Americans Don't Vote
(1988); and The Breaking of the American Social Compact (1997), as
well as dozens of articles, both with Cloward and independently, in
scholarly and popular publications.
Piven is known equally for her
contributions to social theory and for her social activism. Over the course
of her career, she has served on the boards of the ACLU and the Democratic
Socialists of America, and has also held offices in several professional
associations, including the American Political Science Association and the
Society for the Study of Social Problems. In the 1960s, Piven worked with
welfare-rights groups to expand benefits; in the eighties and nineties she
campaigned relentlessly against welfare cutbacks. A veteran of the war on
poverty and subsequent welfare-rights protests both in New York City and on
the national stage, she has been instrumental in formulating the theoretical
underpinnings of those movements. In Regulating the Poor , Piven and
Cloward argued that any advances the poor have made throughout history were
directly proportional to their ability to disrupt institutions that depend
upon their cooperation. This academic commentary proved useful to George
Wiley and the NWRO as well as a great many other community organizers and
urban theorists. Since 1994, Piven has led academic and activist opposition
to the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of
1996," (known as the Personal Responsibility Act), appearing in numerous
public forums, from television's Firing Line to the U.S. Senate, to
discuss the history of welfare and the potential impact of welfare reform
initiatives.
In corollary activity, Piven's study
of voter registration and participation patterns found fruition in the 1983
founding of the HumanSERVE (Human Service Employees Registration and Voter
Education) Campaign. The Campaign's registration reform effort culminated in
the 1994 passage of the National Voter Registration Act, or the
"Motor-Voter" bill, designed to increase voter registration, especially
among low-income groups.
Michael Harrington, whose book The
Other America helped focus the nation's attention on poverty in the early
1960s, has said that Piven is "one of the few academics who bridge the world
of scholarship and the world of activism." Of this mix, Piven herself has
said: "One informs the other, energizes the other . . . There are dimensions
of political life that can't be seen if you stay on the sidelines or close
to the top . . ." The larger significance of both activism and academics in
Piven's life can be gleaned from her remark that such work "also has to do
with comradeship and friendship, . . . with being part of the social world
in which you live and trying to make some imprint on it, . . . with the real
satisfaction of throwing in with the ordinary people who have always been
the force for humanitarian social change."
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Frances Fox Piven
From Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
Frances Fox Piven, born in
Calgary, Alberta,
Canada in 1932, is Distinguished Professor of
Political Science
and
Sociology
at
The Graduate Center,
City University of New York.
She earned her PhD from the
University of Chicago in 1962. In 2006-2007 she served as
the President of the
American Sociological Association.
She was married to her long-time collaborator,
Richard Cloward,
who died in 2001.
[edit]
Activism
Throughout her career, Piven has
combined academic work with activism. One example: In
1983,
she was cofounder of
Human SERVE, an organization
dedicated to getting people to register to vote. The group's
proposition was that people should be asked to register to
vote when applying for social services or using the services
of the Department of Motor Vehicles. Since it is
particularly the poor who often fail to register to
vote—Piven knew this from her research—they tended to be
disenfranchised. Human SERVE's initiative was taken up by
the
Clinton administration and made it
into the
National Voter Registration Act of 1993,
colloquially called the "motor voter bill" (Ehrenreich
2006).
[edit]
Honors and Awards
She has been honored with the
American Sociological Association Career Award for the
Practice of Sociology (2000), the Mary Lepper Award of the
Womens' Caucus of the American Political Science Association
(1998); the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Political
Sociology Section of the American Sociology Association; the
Tides Foundation Award for Excellence in Public Advocacy
(1995); the Annual Award of the National Association of
Secretaries of State (1994); President's Award of the
American Public Health Association (1993), Lee/Founders
Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems; the
Eugene V. Debs Foundation Prize; and the C. Wright Mills
Award. (http://web.gc.cuny.edu/Sociology/faculty/)
[edit]
Bibliography
- Challenging Authority: How
Ordinary People Change America (Rowman and
Littlefield, 2006)
- The War at Home: The
Domestic Costs of Bush's Militarism (New Press,
2004)
- Labor Parties in
Postindustrial Societies (Oxford University Press,
1992)
With Richard Cloward:
- Why Americans Still Don't
Vote: And Why Politicians Want it That Way (Beacon,
2000)
- The Breaking of the
American Social Compact (New Press, 1997)
- Why Americans Don't Vote:
And Why Politicians Want it That Way (Beacon, 1988)
- New Class War: Reagan's
Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences
(Pantheon, 1982)
- Poor People's Movements:
Why the Succeed, How they Fail (Pantheon, 1977)
- Regulating the Poor: The
Functions of Public Welfare (Pantheon, 1971)
With Lee Staples and Richard
Cloward:
- Roots to Power: A Manual
for Grassroots Organizing (Praeger, 1984)
The Frances Fox Piven Papers are
held by
Smith College;
the Fivecolleges.edu website outlines the
Scope and Contents of the Collection
[edit]
Sources and References
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Wednesday
October 29, 2008
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NOTE: You must adjust viewing to reflect NYC time
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