POVERTY, PUBLIC POLICY, & STREET-LEVEL BUREAUCRACY
"Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development, and building good governance."
- Kofi Annan
How do government and non-profit institutions address (or fail to address) the needs of those facing economic hardship?
Public policies and institutions are incredibly important to everyday survival and have the potential to encourage socioeconomic mobility, facilitate gender equality, and break down racial hierarchies if organized and leveraged properly. My work explores what I call “catch-all bureaucracies,” government agencies called upon to be the societal arms of “help,” broadly defined. In light of ongoing debates about the remedies for growing inequality these institutions remain central to our understanding of how those who are economically struggling navigate both macro-level economic and political transformations and micro-level conditions and struggles that shape their financial outlooks.
ACADEMIC ARTICLES
Race, Respect, and Red Tape: Inside the Black Box of Racially Representative Bureaucracies
Watkins-Hayes, Celeste, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 21: i233-i251
Race-ing the Bootstrap Climb: Black and Latino Bureaucrats in Post-Reform Welfare Offices
Watkins-Hayes, Celeste. Social Problems/56(2) : 285-310
Human Services as ‘Race Work’? Historical Lessons and Contemporary Challenges of Black Providers
Watkins-Hayes, Celeste. In Human Services as Complex Organizations
2nd edition, Yeheskel Hasenfeld (Editor). Sage Publications
The Discourse of Deservingness: Morality and the Dilemmas of Poverty Relief in Debate and Practice
Watkins-Hayes, Celeste and Elyse Kovalsky. In The Oxford Handbook of Poverty and Society
David Brady and Linda Burton (Editors). New York: Oxford University Press.