School or Therapy: Two Approaches to Empowering Welfare-Reliant Women

Woodward, Kerry

doi:10.1080/10875549.2014.951982

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…. There are certain things you can’t say in a group.” She added, “Therapy makes you bring up stuff you don’t want to bring up” (Woodward 2014b.). Similar issues arose again when a different counselor came to speak to the same group about domestic violence.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One Black woman quietly defended her, saying she was "cool enough" and then, voicing the real issue, "No one really wants to talk about abuse." Many participants at this office resisted the arguably white, middle-class practice of therapeutically processing emotions and traumatic experiences (Woodward 2014b), or what Rose (1990) calls "technologies of subjectivity," to better function in the formal labor market and have "healthy" relationships.…”

Section: Self-control Through Emotional Regulation and Strategic Selfmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Learning to Labor, Love, and Live: Shaping the Good Neoliberal Citizen in State Work and Marriage Programs

Randles

Woodward

2017

Sociological Perspectives

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Promoting work and marriage were primary aims of the 1996 welfare reform bill, yet implementation of these dual goals has not been analyzed comparatively. In analyzing our respective ethnographic data from government-funded work and marriage classes, we identified similarities in the programs’ focus on teaching the cognitive and emotional skills presumed to comprise what we call the good neoliberal citizen. Drawing on the programs’ curricula and our class observations, we reveal how both pillars of welfare reform sought to promote individual responsibility and economic self-sufficiency among poor parents by teaching skill-based strategies for regulating participants’ thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. We argue that by framing economic mobility as the result of learned capacities for skillful self-regulation and proper planning in the realms of work and family, welfare programs’ attempts to create good neoliberal citizens obscure the structural factors that sustain poverty and the need for welfare.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Self-control Through Emotional Regulation and Strategic Selfmentioning

confidence: 99%