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577 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (2001)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0577 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE The centerpiece of welfare reform is the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. This piece of federal leg- islation was complemented by a wave of changes to welfare laws in the states. Although PRWORA was a watershed event, it could not have happened without 20 years of demonization and delegitimation of poor families on assistance, of the communities within which many of these families reside, and of the systems designed to serve them. Indeed, we see welfare reform as the result of a fusion of political, cultural, and ideological forces and policy presumptions that have ebbed, flowed, and regrouped over the past 50 years. PURPOSE AND LIMITS OF THIS VOLUME The overall purpose of this volume is to present welfare reform in the con- text of a bigger set of political, economic, and policy shifts and to examine how it forces us to reconceptualize poverty and antipoverty policies as well as to rethink the possibilities and limits of the U.S. welfare state. Since those most affected by welfare are single mothers, communities of color, and poor fami- lies, we also consider welfare changes in light of how they both mask and reveal gender, race, and class relations in the United States. In short, we think that the arguments here make the case for ending welfare reform as we know it. They provide part of a vision for a more dependable and responsive state, assuming that a democratic social movement must also be a part of end- ing the economic and political bases for poverty. Before providing an overview of the issues this volume seeks to explore, however, it is instructive to set out what this collection is not. This volume is not a compendium of what is happening now in the states nor a summary of all the amazingly well-funded research findings on the effects of reform. Some of our contributors, especially Sanford Schram, Joe Soss, and Linda Burnham, do provide some useful summarizing of these stud- ies. However, we began this volume with the assumption that most such com- pendia and summaries are the trees of a welfare reform analysis. Instead, we want to look at the forest. Nor is this volume a balanced assortment of the full spectrum of perspec- tives on this highly politicized topic. We have sought to neither cover nor cri- tique all liberal or conservative points ofview about what is wrong or possible. Instead, the perspective of the authors here is feminist, antiracist, and pro- gressive. We selected our contributors because we see them as the scholars who are asking a range of critical questions about the meaning of welfare reform-questions not addressed in mainstream scholarship or journalism. Also, this volume does not provide the sorely needed comparison of efforts to scale back or redirect antipoverty policies in Western nation-states. Rather, 8

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