Policy Travelogue

Catherine Kingfisher is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Lethbridge. She is editor of Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women’s Poverty (2002) and author of Women in the American Welfare Trap (1996). Her research focuses on policy, governance, personhood, gender, and, most recently, happiness and well-being.

“Kingfisher’s book is a theoretically productive account of how welfare reform policies develop and travel…from the world of policy elites to the daily lives of poor single mothers… An important strength of Kingfisher’s book is the range of data she uses from locations that are less discussed in the literature on policy and especially in the literature on welfare reform.” · PoLAR“Despite the empirical challenges evident in research that focuses on welfare policy in two different locations and on different levels of policy, Kingfisher skillfully composes her results into a coherent narrative [...] I'd recommend the book especially as course material, since it opens up possibilities for analyzing the phenomenon we call the welfare state from a different point of view than just that of welfare state models and large-scale political shifts." · Sosiologia“[Kingfisher’s] work is distinctive in taking policy from the minister to the client and service user.  That is an achievement in itself, but to have done it in parallel studies of two countries is remarkable.”  ·  Richard Freeman, University of Edinburgh“This is a groundbreaking book…that represents a sophisticated assemblage of ideas to frame and drive the analysis of data gleaned through long-term engagement with each site…Using the well-delineated concepts of travel, assemblage, and translation, [Kingfisher] explains the contradictory ways in which policy discourse is produced and through which traveling ideas ‘touch down’ in varied places and times and are selectively taken up by people in varied systems of social relations and grounded experiences.”  ·  Judith Goode, Temple University

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Tracing Policy: Translation and AssemblageChapter 1. The New Zealand Model at Home and AbroadChapter 2. Producing Policy in Welfare OfficesChapter 3. “Reading Through” Welfare Policy in Community Service AgenciesChapter 4. Working with Policy in “Real Life”: Welfare Mothers’ EngagementsConclusions:  Tracing Policy: Process/PowerAppendix I: Key Moments in State Provisioning for Poor Mothers in Aotearoa/New ZealandAppendix II: Key Moments in State Provisioning for Poor Mothers in Canada and AlbertaReferences