Gene F. Summers – författare

Since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was enacted, policy makers, agency administrators, community activists, and academics from a broad range of disciplines have debated and researched the implications of welfare reform in the United States. Most of the attention, however, has focused on urban rather than rural America. Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty examines welfare participants who live in chronically poor rural areas of the United States where there are few job opportunities and poor systems of education, transportation, and child care. Kathleen Pickering and her colleagues look at welfare reform as it has been experienced in four rural and impoverished regions of the United States: American Indian reservations in South Dakota, the Rio Grande region, Appalachian Kentucky, and the Mississippi Delta. Throughout these areas the rhetoric of reform created expectations of new opportunities to find decent work and receive education and training. In fact, these expectations have largely gone unfulfilled as welfare reform has failed to penetrate poor areas where low-income families remain isolated from the economic and social mainstream of American society. Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty sheds welcome light on the opportunities and challenges that welfare reform has imposed on low-income families situated in disadvantaged areas. Combining both qualitative and quantitative research, it will be an excellent guide for scholars and practitioners alike seeking to address the problem of poverty in rural America.

The possibility of nuclear war, the failure of the Green Revolution, the capabilities of genetic engineering, and other actual and potential effects of technological innovations have created demands for a more humane application of technology. Addressing this issue, Technology and Social Change in Rural Areas is a clear assessment of the current state of affairs. The book begins with a discussion of the changing paradigms of technology adoption and diffusion, the dynamics of public resistance, and the question of social responsibility in an age of synthetic biology. In subsequent sections, the contributors assess the revolutionary effect of technology on agriculture worldwide and conclude that radically new public policies are essential; expose the transformations of rural life and communities that result from the localized effects of technology and its use as a weapon in world-system politics; and critically examine the appropriate technology movement. The essays are presented to honor Professor Eugene A. Wilkening for his many pioneering and lasting contributions to the study of technology and rural social change. The book includes an intellectual biography of Professor Wilkening written by his long-time colleague and friend, William H. Sewell.