Publications
2024
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Journal of Marriage and Family, Jun 2024
Abstract
Arguably the most important recent shift in child welfare policy has been a move away from non-relative foster care and toward kin placement. Yet increasing family complexity along with network disadvantage may weaken kin support. This study draws on 81 in-depth interviews with a sample of parents with prior involvement with child protective services in New Jersey. We examined parents’ accounts of how their extended kin networks shaped and were shaped by the child protective services process. Parents often indicated that the quality of kin ties helped to steer case outcomes, benefitting parents with supportive and resourced family connections and impairing those isolated from family or embedded in disadvantaged networks. State intervention into the family also affected kin ties, often compromising parents’ relationships with relatives. The results of this study reveal that child welfare agencies prioritize kin support as a solution to addressing family needs even though the parents who come under the purview of CPS often lack supportive kin networks. This study has implications for understanding the family safety net and the role of kin networks in government processes.
2023
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Social Service Review, Oct 2023
Abstract
Research shows that street-level bureaucrats rely on notions of deservingness to manage their caseloads. Accounts traditionally identify how workers use mainstream cues to categorize clients, but a growing literature calls for situated accounts of discretion. This study draws on fieldwork with public defenders to describe how institutional position and professional knowledge condition discretion. I analyze how the dynamics of representation inform defenders’ understandings of and advocacy for clients with varying criminal-legal backgrounds and needs. In this case study, defenders’ perceived strategic options penetrate their estimations of clients’ deservingness and drive their advocacy. Tailored representation elevates the needs of individuals without records and those with unremitting criminal-legal contact, helping attorneys manage their caseloads and advance their aspirations, but it produces uneven defense. I develop a role concept, “structural antagonist,” to signify and describe a uniquely situated street-level bureaucrat whose mandate includes both serving and straining the institution.
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Theory and Society, Feb 2023
Abstract
Sociologists have long studied the ways people resist oppression but have devoted far less empirical attention to the ways people resign to it. As a result, researchers have neglected the mechanisms of resignation and how people narrate their lived experiences. Drawing on 81 interviews with parents with past child protective services cases, this article provides an empirical account of resignation in an institutional setting, documenting how parents understand relinquishing their rights as a process of personalization, calculation, or socialization. Phenomenologically, parents typically confronted multiple barriers and setbacks simultaneously, the combined weight of which pressured them to “give up,” interpreting structural and institutional pressures as individual choice. This article accordingly identifies resignation as a crucial feature of democratic governance.
2021
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Politics & Society, Nov 2021Published in print Mar 2023
Abstract
In recent years, housing costs have outpaced incomes in the United States, resulting in millions of eviction filings each year. Yet no study has examined the link between eviction and voting. Drawing on a novel data set that combines tens of millions of eviction and voting records, this article finds that residential eviction rates negatively impacted voter turnout during the 2016 presidential election. Results from a generalized additive model show eviction’s effect on voter turnout to be strongest in neighborhoods with relatively low rates of displacement. To address endogeneity bias and estimate the causal effect of eviction on voting, the analysis treats commercial evictions as an instrument for residential evictions, finding that increases in neighborhood eviction rates led to substantial declines in voter turnout. This study demonstrates that the impact of eviction reverberates far beyond housing loss, affecting democratic participation.