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4. Which Side Are You On? Rethinking Research and Advocacy in Social Welfare
- NYU Press
- Chapter
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Which Side Are You On? Rethinking Research and Advocacy in Social Welfare The politics of scholarship in recent years highlights the difficulties of articulating politically productive and socially progressive relationships between social science research and social welfare politics. These difficulties are demonstrated in several recent calls for reconfiguring the relationship of social science to social welfare. Pleas for both a more political and a more scientific social science have rung hollow to me. A good part of the problem is their failure to give a priority to political struggle. In what follows, I examine two calls for changing the relationship of social science to social welfare—one that calls for more politics in the social science of welfare and poverty, and one that calls for less politics in research on social work practice. While I find the former more appealing and therefore spend less time criticizing it, both are, in my mind, inadequate. Both fail to give sufficient priority to political struggle as the first order of business, the unavoidable starting point for analysis, and the ineliminable reality of the relationship of social science to social welfare policy and practice. Both fail to appreciate the importance of resisting the pitfalls associated with a “top-down” approach to connecting research to politics and of giving more emphasis to a “bottom-up” approach that starts with the people who are struggling to challenge the power that oppresses them.1 Both take what should be a debate about which different types of research should be seen as making significant contributions to knowledge and turn it into a basis for implying that “research” is by definition appropriately limited to a highly select group of conventional qualitative and quantitative analyses. And for this reason, both in the end are unlikely to encourage forms of research that are consonant with “radical incrementalism.” In 4 109 what follows, I suggest why and offer some thoughts on research that is more consistent with radical incrementalism. Political Contingency: The Ineliminable Reality In Poverty Knowledge, Alice O’Connor offers a meticulously researched and thoughtfully composed history of the role of social science in social welfare policy.2 Her examination of the history of social science research on poverty suggests that it has increasingly become a highly technical field dominated by quantitative modeling grounded in economic reasoning. As a result, the field has become more narrow, less critical, and more in service of state power. She recommends more methodological diversity and encourages a politicized scholarship that is more attentive to how its research gets appropriated for political purposes in the public policy arena. Yet, I can offer only qualified support for O’Connor’s call for a politically engaged, methodologically diverse social science of poverty. Her call for methodological diversity and political engagement is only the beginning of the kind of thinking needed to promote a better future of social science in social welfare. Poverty Knowledge is a work of history and is not to be faulted for not demonstrating in detail what the new and improved social science would look like. Nor should it be criticized for not clarifying how the role of social science in social welfare would be different if its recommendations were followed. These are not valid criticisms for me. I do have concerns that by not specifying the proposed alternative social science and its role in social welfare, O’Connor leaves the door open for less than favorable versions of her suggestions to be emphasized by others.3 Yet, I have additional concerns that I want to emphasize here. I am interested in offering the kind of criticism that is consistent with the spirit of O’Connor ’s call for a more methodologically diverse and politically engaged social science of poverty. I want to criticize O’Connor for not going far enough in calling for a new poverty knowledge. Simply put, my main criticism is that calling for methodological diversity and political engagement are not enough if we want to engender a more politically progressive role for social science research in social welfare politics. More than methodological diversity and political engagement, we need to invert the relationship of social science research to social welfare policy. We need to challenge the assumption that social science in theory precedes social welfare advocacy in practice. We need to challenge, therefore, the as110 | Which Side Are You On? [3.239.57.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:42 GMT) sumption that research is the foundation for policy, and that...