but a denial that I see what LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google, I see what those guys are doing, but that's really, you know, you live in the Bay Area and it's kind of wacky, and you know, that doesn't affect us. And I think the big shift that I've seen in the last year is really each of, you know, every CXO around the globe across industries is now starting to see, oh, I'm starting to get how this might affect me, my business and how I need to do things differently.  And so I think the, and I'm sorry, getting a little long-winded there, but I think the, you know, the point of commodity hardware trends and kind of scale-out architectures, meeting software like Green Plum and Hadoop and you know, kind of technologies to take advantage of the commodity trends and the amount of data that is coming at these organizations or available to the organizations, not just structured data inside of the enterprise, but also unstructured data and then public data. And the idea of how do I start to correlate applications and solutions and create application frameworks that are agile in nature and you know, more real-time, right? Of what's happening in the moment of how I'm going to interact with my customers and different businesses. And so that's profoundly different. And so we have to think about things differently on the application frameworks and the rest of it. So that's what we're seeing and you know, we really like our position, we're very focused on our product strategy, which is a piece of this, building the stack, including Green Plum, Hadoop and Chorus. But as importantly or more importantly would be, you know, the skill sets of the people. How do we think about application development in a different way? How do we think about the frameworks of how people are going to develop, whether it's for a particular environment or in the cloud, right? These things need to span that whole spectrum and we've got to be a good steward of that. We've got to innovate. We've got to drive the technology stacks and then correlate with the people skill sets. That's why we're doing the data science summit here at the event tomorrow. We have the Green Plum Connect event on Thursday of bringing customers and prospects together to talk about these trends and what's happening. Yeah, so you mentioned you were talking to some analysts and I always say that you can sort of see what's happening with a new wave by how the analysts respond to it because as a former analyst, a current analyst or a former analyst, a big firm, analysts can smell a trend, right? And they've got territory, they've got patch and they want to protect it, right? So I'm sure you're talking to storage analysts and BI analysts and the sort of new emerging big data analysts, probably some development types. They're all sort of gravitating around this big data trend much in the same way that did cloud, much in the same way that did internet. And so my question is you're seeing, at least we're seeing in our customer base, a real sort of dissonance between the traditional BI guys and the new emerging, you know, the big data purists, the Hadoop and those guys where one is looking to say, okay, this is a big opportunity, it's going to change the world. The BI guys are sort of maybe not as convinced, you know, trying to figure out how to bring the two together. What are you seeing there? Well, you know, I think everyone has a different perspective about this, right? And it's not that any of them are wrong, right? It's all kind of point in time discussions and the journey. And from my perspective, we're driving innovation to this new world, right? Including Hadoop and the overall infrastructure. And, you know, again, my experience is you have to be respectful of the environments as they exist today. You have to be complimentary to what exists and start to bridge that gap. And so it's really just a trade-off the way I think about it that the problem with just focusing on one specific area or one specific framework of what may exist today is, you know, it can drag you down candidly in what's possible. And so from our perspective, what we're trying to do is create an environment and show the world of what's possible, you know, from the technology stack and the different algorithms from an analytics perspective and start to move more towards real time and correlation of events and the rest of it. And then, you know, those dots will connect over time, meaning, you know, enterprise data warehousing, as we know it, or traditional BI, those things don't go away. It's just really a matter of emphasis, right? Of kind of bridging to the new world and what's possible. And so I don't, you know, I try not to get caught up in that hype, if you will, and say, you know, there's a place for everything, but let's be clear here. There's a fundamental shift going on and this transformational wave is different. It's not just incremental. It's a fundamental change in architecture going forward. And I think, you know, the notion of data and big data and the connotation around that is really important to get. Yeah, so the reason for my bringing this up is part hype, but really more a practical factor. And that is that, you know, we hear of the belief that every organization has to make data a core competence. And so when you think about the Data Science Summit, you're going to attract a lot of data scientists. And I'm curious as to whether or not you think you'll attract a lot of the traditional BI guys because our premise is those worlds do have to come together because they play important roles in the data strategy of an organization. So what's your expectation there? Yeah, I mean, we've been very careful about the positioning and hopefully you guys have picked up on that. But when we talk about data scientists, we talk in terms of the data science community. And when we talk in terms of data science, it's really the expertise across that whole spectrum of fields. Yeah, BI and data architects and executive line of business executives that all have to be collaborative, right, in those discussions. Data scientists is obviously an important part of this and the PhDs that get the data models and what's possible with the tools. I don't want to diminish the importance of that. But as you said, I think, rightfully, there's a broader ecosystem that we need to connect with that tie this into business value and the rest of it. And that whole community is part of this transformation that's occurring. So that brings me to chorus. You mentioned collaboration. And so it seems to me that when you have all these disparate sort of groups off doing their own thing now you've got this lightning rod of data. Chorus is sort of designed to facilitate those interactions and help people create value. So give us an update on chorus and is that the correct premise? No, it's exactly the correct premise. I mean, I think you know some of the background and maybe I'll just pause for a second on chorus. The background on chorus was as we started to work with our key customers and the data science community and data scientists, we were asking them why, you know, when you think about analytics and predictive analytics, given these scale out architectures, why aren't we seeing this technology be more pervasive across organizations? More like we're seeing today, candidly, but this is two and a half years ago that we started this journey. And you know, they identified basically three areas that basically get in their way of being more productive. And that was the foundation of chorus and three elements were really data access, meaning all the data I need to get my arms around doesn't sit inside of my current database. So how do I get access to these data sources that sit inside of my enterprise and outside of my enterprise? That was one problem statement. The second problem statement was around provisioning.  I need to be able to provision on the fly, mouse click, like, I have an idea, I want to go test it. Yeah, it's been up a 10 terabyte sandbox for me. And so provisioning and virtualization, obviously I worked with VMware, was really critical to that. And then the third element was this notion of collaboration, kind of a front end user interface, user friendly tool that allows not only the data scientists and the data architects and the analysts, but the executive and anyone involved in the process to be part of this communications. Like, how do I communicate a good idea? And how do I have them expose the data that I'm working with in my insights so that I can build upon that? Because it's very iterative in how they work. And yet there wasn't infrastructure or tools for that to happen. So those were the three foundational elements of Chorus and we built it for the community, for this data community, and that's why ultimately we've decided to open source it, as you know, to create it as a platform for people to build applications and solutions and their frameworks on top of. And I think it's an important element of the kinds of technology that need to be contributed to this movement if it's truly going to be transformational. So Jeff Kelly, the lead big data analyst at Wikibon, the leading analyst in the business, you got the head of Green Plum here. What's the big question on your mind? Well, kind of talking about the open source community and we're seeing a lot of activity, of course, Hadoop and the open source community and some of the peripheral sub-projects around Hadoop. But it seems to me there is certainly a tension between a proprietary approach and the open approach. And Green Plum has been very heavily involved, adopted to Hadoop very early, in my opinion, in this movement. So how do you deal with that tension between the two and how does a company like Green Plum EMC operate in a community that really does focus very much on the open source aspects of the business? I think we have to be a good steward of both, right? In some sense. So we want to be a good citizen and participant in the open source movement, doing things like Hadoop and Chorus and be part of that community and contribute to that community. But the other side is people are always looking for more features, more scalability, more enterprise type capabilities. And so I don't view it as a tension candidly. I view it as you can be a good participant in both camps, right? And offer a proprietary systems or solutions on top of open source solutions. I mean, that was the heritage of Green Plum. As you recall, coming back to our Postgres days. And I think the tension that you probably speak to is how do you balance those two objectives? And that's something we want to be thoughtful about and be part of the community. I mean, it's candidly, it's in our self-interest to be involved in the community and have the community prosper and flourish and get a lot of users. I think that's just not only good from a technology, it's what we believe in and our core that we want to create a platform that's more universal. We will do quite well as a business, right? If we help with that whole community move towards this new transformation that's occurring. So I don't really view them at odds. It's actually a fairly simple or easy decision from our perspective. We're not trying to be all things to all people. We're trying to create and build the world's best big data platform, if you will, a combination of MPP technology like Green Plum, Hadoop. We're all in on Hadoop. And things like Chorus that we'll innovate on top of. And then we want to have a broad ecosystems of partners and solutions that are going to build these new frameworks and new applications for industries and enterprise customers to leverage this platform. So the economics work well for us, candidly. Yeah, Tim O'Reilly has to say, you create more value than you extract. That's sort of the tentative of open systems. And he says it's a self-serving premise in which I totally believe it. I totally agree. That's why I don't view it somewhat conflicted. I mean, I think from our perspective, you just want to be very genuine and very kind of open about your view of it. And I think we are, and we're trying to be that kind of company and deliver good value, not only to the customers, the enterprise side of this, but also the developers. Our acquisition of Pivotal Labs was really about the developer community. And as you know, you were there when you kind of peel the onion back, you know, what Rob, me has really built there, even though they do projects and they help people with their application development.  I mean, he's trying to teach people the agile framework because he fundamentally believes in that, that will help in the way applications need to get written into the future. And so that's what we're trying to do with Pivotal because I think those dots do connect around big data agility and these new application frameworks and kind of the skill sets they bring to the table. That was great acquisition. It certainly caught a lot of our attention. Bold move, I mean, it's a non-conventional move in a way. And now it's under green light. Have we been known to be conventional? Well, no, but still, I mean, in a lot of times, I could see a lot of people just talking you out of making an acquisition like that. And I had to be one of these like, it just feels right, we're going to do it type of things. Now, if you can maintain that culture, that is I think a huge win because you mentioned agile. They even talked about DevOps. I mean, they're at the forefront of development trends. You see what's happening with VMware and the big land grab that's going on in the development community. That Pivotal Labs acquisition, I thought was really outstanding. Well, I mean, I think we'll take some credit for it. And obviously, you know, Scott Yarra was critical to this was Scott's really vision of where things are going and why it was so important. Us getting to know Rob a little bit and his team was really critical because that's got to be a cultural fit as well. But you know, to answer your question, I think if you talk to Joe Tucci or Pat Gelsinger, they were equally excited about the acquisition. So even though we were the catalyst for it, it was important for us that they understood the positioning and actually became believers in that because it wasn't the natural, maybe next step, you know, it did catch some people by surprise. And so to me, that was a reflection on how excited we were about us being acquired by EMC and really signing on to the right company between EMC and VMware to deliver on this mission that we set off to do, you know, many years ago. Right, all right, Bill. Well, we just got the break sign. Green Plum seems to be doing really well. It seems like the EMC Salesforce is really starting to understand we're going, we heard several months ago, a lot of POCs going on and now we're seeing those turned into real deals. You get a lot of traction. I think I'm personally very impressed. We've seen EMC invest in Green Plum. We've seen other acquisitions. I mean, I'll note Vertica and HP is not in a position, I guess, right now to invest in. And that's too bad because I think there's some real innovation that could occur across the ecosystem, but clearly EMC sees that opportunity doubling down. I'm sure you are. But so congratulations on the progress you've made. I think it's frankly exceeded my expectations. And I'm looking, now my expectations are way high, so I'm looking for really big things. So good luck with that. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, thanks so much. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back. We got Rich Napolitano coming up live from EMC World. This is theCUBE, siliconangle.tv. Keep it right there.


I'm Lynn Vedeca, I'm the Dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan and I have the great honor of introducing Kristen Seafeld to you today. I want to welcome everyone to this afternoon's book discussion and celebration, nothing more fun than celebrating the publication of a book and Kristen Seafeld's new book, Abandoned Families, Social Isolation in the 21st Century. This is a deep and powerful examination of 45 women who struggled not only with economic recession but also deep and growing structural disadvantages between the years 2006 and 2011. It's a very moving book, very deep book and I very much look forward to the presentation. Before I make the formal introduction of Kristen, let me just get a few pieces of business out of the way. So first of all I want to say that this event is co-hosted by the School of Social Work, the Ford School and Poverty Solutions. I want to thank Laura Lee and all the staff from the three entities who pitched in to make this such a great event today. As is the tradition at the Ford School, we'll handle Q&A via question cards or Twitter as Ford usually does for its events. So I want to remind our audience that if you have a question for our panelists, please write it on one of the cards passed out at the entrance and volunteers will collect the cards around 4.30. Professor Luke Schaefer, who's here in cosponsoring this event from Poverty Solutions and two of his grad students will consolidate the cards and read your questions. And if you're watching online, please send your question via Twitter using the hashtag policy talks. After the talk, there will be a reception and book signing immediately to follow just outside of the auditorium. So we hope many of you will stay and join and continue the conversation. And now it's my pleasure to introduce our author, today's celebrated author, Kristin Seafeld. Our applause will come later. That was my pause, not the applause pause, but that's all right. So Kristin has, as many of you know, Kristin is an assistant professor at the School of Social Work. She's also an assistant professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And as is in the proud tradition of the University of Michigan and its excellent long tradition of poverty researchers, Kristin holds several additional appointments. She's an assistant research scientist at the Population Research Center. She is an assistant research scientist also here at Ford. She has been assistant director of the Poverty Center and is an affiliated faculty member of Poverty Solutions. Kristin holds her Ph.D. in Sociology and Public Policy from the University of Michigan, a master's degree as well, and her bachelor's degree is from Georgetown University and American Government. Kristin's primary research interests lie, and as exemplified in today's book we'll be discussing, lie in exploring how low-income individuals understand their situations, particularly around issues related to work and economic well-being and their place within society. And this book we'll be talking, Kristin will be talking to us about today, we'll be discussing Abandoned Families is one of four books that she has authored or co-authored and it explores the ways in which various institutions that once fostered economic security and upward mobility have failed low and moderate-income families, particularly families of color today. So with no further ado, I introduce to you Kristin Sifo. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Lynn, for that gracious introduction. Thanks to Dean Collins of the Ford School for coming this afternoon and for both the School of Social Work, the School of Public Policy, Poverty Solutions for giving me this great opportunity to talk about my book. I also want to thank you all for coming, and a special thanks to my colleagues from the School of Social Work who made the trek over and my students who are attending even after they've listened to me talk, either so much this week or this past semester. I'm just one person who's up here and who also apparently advanced the slides without knowing, but this, the work that this book is based on is really a strong group effort and although I don't want to take too much time doing thank you's, I want to recognize a few very important folks. So one is Teddy Engler who started working with me when she was a student. She conducted a good number of the interviews that I'll be talking about today. She's now a stellar researcher and her own right here at the Ford School. I also want to recognize Michael Barr of the Ford School and the Law School who I think is on a plane right now, but he really provided me with an avenue for getting this project off the ground. Sheldon Danzinger, the former director of the National Poverty Center provided me with many resources throughout this, funding, moral support, and a red pen to many drafts of papers that I wrote. And finally, without any doubt, this book probably would still be unrealized potential without the support of my partner Greg Levine, so thank you for all of that. So with that said, any and all mistakes and possible misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. And also I wanted to note, too, that the work that I'm going to talk about today is work that was done in a community that's not mine. It was conducted mostly in Detroit and with people who don't share my same positionality as a white woman who lives in the affluent city of Ann Arbor, who's well educated and a well compensated researcher. So I'm coming to this work from a position of privilege and I'm never going to exactly know how that might have affected my interactions with women. And despite I think what I perceive to be my best efforts, I also know that I'm likely to have, in some instances, misinterpreted what people said or maybe analyzed it through a lens that they might not think is appropriate. But it's this group of women that I really owe the biggest thanks and the most gratitude toward. That me in their homes and shared their stories with me for many years. So let me go ahead and introduce you to one of these women. So Geneva, which is not her real name, nor is this a picture actually of her, is a mother of four in her early 40s and she was the first person to contact me about participating in the study that led to abandoned families. So she said that she was currently homeless and temporarily staying with her sister, although she anticipated that that arrangement was not going to last much longer. This situation she was in was a dramatic departure from what her life had been like the previous few years. She was married and until she hit hard times she'd been employed. She and her husband had been homeowners. They owned two cars and although she herself grew up in modest circumstances, she considered herself as once having reached the middle class. Her problems started when she went into work one evening during a major snowstorm. She slipped and fell in the parking lot and she was unable to get back up. Her back was badly injured and she was hospitalized for a long time. Since the accident happened at work, Geneva assumed that she would be able to receive some form of workers' compensation, but her employers didn't agree. She said to me, it was absolutely horrible. They said, well, we don't know that you fell, even though they could see the blood and see my footprints and the police saw me. She tried to return to work, but her injuries and her employer's unwillingness to make accommodations led to her being fired. She was eventually able to secure disability benefits, but along the way she accrued significant medical debt, got behind on her home and car payments and faced foreclosure and repossession of her vehicles. Her husband, as Geneva put it, cracked under the pressure of all of their financial problems and he left. Nevertheless, Geneva remained hopeful that she would be able to return to work someday and for a time she was actually very upbeat. She said, sometimes I feel like life has handed me a really raw deal, but then she quickly added, but there's nowhere else to go except up. I've already been down there and if I have to go back down there, at least I'll know how to deal with it if I do. Trying to go up, Geneva enrolled in a career training program, which promised her that she would gain skills to enter a high-demand, high-growth job. Once she finished though, the only job she could find was not in her field and paid just enough to make her ineligible for all of the public benefits she had been receiving and in the end, worse off financially when her work-related expenses were factored in. But what this less-than-year-long training program did give her was $10,000 in student loans and a degree from a for-profit institution that would later be shut down by the federal government for its predatory practices. So how do we understand Geneva's story? Certainly during the Great Recession, there were stories of job loss and the hardships that followed were all too common. You could read about them in the paper all the time. More recently, for-profit education providers have come under scrutiny by the federal government and mounting student loan debt is a national concern and affects students attending all types of institutions, including U of M here. Social workers and social policy analysts might point to the frame safety net which fails to provide adequate protection and can penalize those who seek to get ahead. What I attempted to do was look at Geneva's story and those of the other women who participated in the study through a framework that has infused much of the sociological literature on urban poverty and indeed has informed a lot of our social policy for the last several decades. And that's the concept of social isolation. So as some of you very well know, in 1987, William Julius Wilson's book on urban poverty, The Truly Disadvantaged, was released and it brought the term social isolation into the lexicon of social scientists. So Wilson argued that within central cities in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods, there lived individuals and families who, as he quoted, whose behavior contrasts sharply with that of mainstream America. And these behaviors that he referred to were consisted of joblessness, criminal activity, dropping out of high school, and so-called dependency on welfare. However, Wilson noted that this was not the result of bad individual choices, but rather because these folks had really limited contact with employed individuals, with community organizations, and the institutions that helped form and sustain working in middle class families. Wilson's argument was a structural one. And while social isolation might manifest itself in joblessness or rely on some public benefits, fundamentally what happened was that desegregation efforts allowed the black middle class to move away from central cities and jobs also relocated to the suburbs, cutting off important sources of opportunity and upward mobility for poor individuals who remain behind. But can we really think about Geneva's being socially isolated in Wilson's sense of the term? She lived in Detroit, a central city. She is African-American, and at the time she was quite poor. She'd had a lengthy spell of unemployment, but for most of her adult life she'd been working and at one time even had some of the accoutrements of middle class life. She didn't drop out of school, but she rather was trying to get more education. What I'm arguing instead is that the structures of opportunity and mobility themselves have been altered, and they've been altered through various economic policy and political changes. Labor post-secondary and housing markets don't offer the same opportunities for advancement and wealth building that they once did. Social protections have been stripped away, leaving families exposed to great financial risk. And families are not only unable to move up economically, but they're left in debt, both from their investments that they try to make for the future and also their struggles to make ends meet. This is what I call social abandonment. Moreover, social abandonment is a new form of separate unequal. Affected individuals are relegated to separate and segregated labor and housing markets, separate post-secondary institutions, and separate financial products. And the debt that families must take on functions as a modern day form of sharecropping. And I'm using these terms separate and unequal and segregated and sharecropping very deliberately because as I argue in the book, the phenomenon of social abandonment is the latest set of policy choices and institutional changes that serve to perpetuate racial inequality. And certainly poor and lower income whites have been affected by aspects of social abandonment, but fundamentally social abandonment is tied to our particular sociopolitical history. Our past and ongoing discrimination as well as racial residential segregation and predatory practices and lending are more frequently deployed against people of color. Finally, social abandonment can help us understand the maintenance and growth of income and wealth inequality between blacks and whites. So this is the primary argument of my book. What I'd like to do next is back up a little bit and outline the rest of my presentation. But for the remainder of the time, I want to talk a little bit more about who are these abandoned families and what domains does social abandonment occur. And finally conclude with what are some things that might help alleviate it. For the sake of time and also so that I can really provide a broad overview of what's in the book, I'm not going to go into detail about this, the study behind the book, except to say that my findings are based on interviews with 45 women. The same women were interviewed yearly from 2006 to 2011. At the beginning, most of them lived in southeast Michigan and of those most in most in Detroit, although many moved lots of times during the course of the study. Most of them were African American and single mothers, although many had been married previously, some got married over the course of the study. Most of them were poor or had incomes very close to the poverty line, although a few had slightly higher incomes. In the book, I call these women strivers. They're actively engaged in activities and attempts to move out of poverty and into the middle class or to maintain the very precarious middle class status that they've latched on to. So by conducting in-depth interviews with the women and analyzing that data, thousands of pages of interview transcripts, and then placing those findings into the context of larger social trends and the findings from other studies. That is what led me to my conclusions about social abandonment. A couple other points worth noting. Even though my study is based in Detroit, I don't think that social abandonment is really fundamentally a story about families just in Detroit. If you look at data on home ownership, on college enrollment, on student loan debt, predatory lending, and other trends, it lends credits to the argument that this is a national phenomenon and is helping to reproduce and maintain inequalities. I also don't believe this is a story about the Great Recession, which of course occurred right during the time of our data collection. When we asked most women directly about how the recession was affecting them, some could point to friends and family members who'd lost jobs, and there was a general sense that it was a little bit harder to find jobs, but only a couple really saw themselves as being directly affected. Certainly the subprime mortgage crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble did play a role in draining families of any wealth they hoped to accrue through home ownership. In other parts of the country, housing prices are climbing back to their pre-recession levels, but in Detroit, and as well as in other predominantly African-American communities, this recovery in prices has not happened. Let me now turn to the various places where social abandonment plays out. The first I want to talk about is employment. For many of us in the room, work is our primary source of income, and it's probably, if you're not in school, the major organizer of your time. Within the poverty literature, and as I noted earlier, unemployment is thought to contribute to this phenomenon of social isolation. Let's then assume that work can be an integrating mechanism, and we know that there has been just quite a bit of research done on all of the various negative aspects of the low-wage labor market, the labor market in which most of these women worked. These include unstable hours in schedules, low pay, the lack of benefits in these jobs, and indeed the jobs in which women in the study worked had all of those characteristics. But I want to focus on a couple of other issues over and above this. So to do that, let me introduce you to Shanice. So Shanice was just 19 years old when we started interviewing her. At the time, she was looking for a job, but she'd already held a lot of different positions, some in light manufacturing, some in retail. They all were temp jobs, though, and none of them lasted very long. She dropped out of high school in the 12th grade because she didn't like the alternative schools she'd been sent to when she got pregnant, and she really did believe that a lack of a degree was holding her back from getting a better job. The next year, though, she was excited to report that she had completed training to become a certified nurse's assistant, and she had just passed the state certification exam. She hadn't found a job yet, but her certification was brand new, and she felt very confident. The following year when we met up with her, she had a job, but it wasn't as a nurse's assistant. She worked for an agency that sent her out to people's homes to do, as she described it, quote, bathe them, dress them, clean up for them, help them with their prescriptions. While Shanice had definitely received training in all of these tasks, she was really functioning and had her job title as a home health aide. This is one of the fastest growing occupations in the country, but it is one that is quite low-paying. Moreover, Shanice had very little supervision on her job. When I asked her how much supervision she received, she said, I'm basically on my own. As for coworkers, she said, I pretty much don't even see my coworkers. She often faxed in her time sheets and got her work assignments over the phone, rarely even going into the agency's office. So why would working alone matter? In one regard, Shanice was basically invisible to her employer, and one might think that that could make her all that much easier to fire. Except for her clients she saw, she had no connections to anyone else at her workplace, making it harder for her to learn from others, harder to do any labor organizing if she'd wanted to do that, and it harder to form bonds with coworkers. These bonds might be particularly important in the low-wage labor market, given other things that happen in these workplaces, which I'll just talk about in a moment. This experience wasn't just limited to people who worked as home health care jobs. Many other low-wage jobs are isolating in that sense, including jobs where people are working on the night shift when things are very sparsely staffed, jobs that require people to work out of their home, and other service sector jobs. This isolation also potentially exacerbates another challenge found in this sector of the labor market, and that's the extent to which workplace violations occur. So to illustrate this, I'm going to return back to Geneva. So Geneva did try to go back to her job at the telecommunications firm after she was mostly healed from her injury, but she needed some accommodations. She needed to have her desk move closer to the restroom so she wouldn't have to walk very far. She needed access to a handicapped parking space in the lot, and she needed a special chair with lumbar support. Her desk never got moved. She didn't get the parking pass, but she got the chair for at least for a short period of time. She relayed the story, though, of what happened next. She said, they took my chair because other people started complaining, oh, she is a special chair, and her chair does this and that, and so they took my chair.  Shortly after that, Geneva was fired due to attendance issues. She often had to miss work when her pain got bad. Although the telling of this firing is clearly only from Geneva's side of the story, the incident of the chair does seem to be a clear violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. Geneva had a doctor's prescription for the chair, and under the ADA, if Geneva could perform the essential functions of her job with reasonable accommodations, she should have been provided those accommodations. The chair was one of those, and it might be conceivable that allowing some flexibility in her schedule could be a reasonable accommodation. But Geneva didn't know that she could have possibly filed a lawsuit for ADA noncompliance, and her employer probably counted on that lack of knowledge. With workplace isolation, workers lack connections to others who might help inform them about their rights. However, low-wage workers are very much unlikely to have the money and the time to engage in potential court case, which is what the ADA requires. More than many of them had endured previous abusive workplace behavior. They distrusted their employers, and they really believe their only recourse when faced with situations like this was to quit. Now, some folks might argue that one way to escape this sort of environment was to get out of the low-wage labor market, and to do that, get more education and get a better job, and many women tried this. But they were abandoned by the promise of higher education for promoting upward mobility. Let me introduce you to Yvette, whose story illustrates this. So despite having her first and second children at a very young age, Yvette completed her bachelor's degree in business management. But that degree was a long time in coming. She said, quote, well, it took me about 12 years, one class at a time. But I just stuck with it, because when I had my oldest child, everybody said my life was over, ruined, you know? But I still had that get up and go about me. For a starver like Yvette, that get up and go translated into working a full time job, raising her sons, and of course, taking one class at a time. Originally, she enrolled in a community college in the state she was living in at the time. She moved back to Michigan, and she started taking classes at Wayne State. But ultimately, her degree came from the University of Phoenix, a largely online for-profit degree-granting institution. The cost of community college in Wayne State had actually been low enough that she could afford to pay out of her pocket what financial aid didn't cover. But when she moved to the University of Phoenix, she needed to take out loans to pay tuition, $30,000 of loans in total. 10 years after finishing, she proclaimed the degree to be, quote, worthless. She said, I'm paying $30,000 on this student loan for something that's giving me a job one step above McDonald's. After all the years and all the money she had invested in higher education, the payoff was a stressful, isolating phone sales job, where she was earning $45,000 a year with no real chance of ever earning much more. The experience of women like Yvette, who are enrolled in post-secondary education programs, is markedly different compared to those, you know, a student attending a four-year institution like the University of Michigan, you know, full-time living on campus and taking classes in a physical classroom where there's other students and there's actually an instructor there in person. Going to school could be a lonely and really isolated enterprise for these women, very separate and unequal from the traditional system of higher education. Many women took online classes, never seen an instructor or classmates. Further, some women lacked examples in their networks of people who had gone to school so they often didn't understand the implications of going part-time and what that would do for financial aid or choosing and changing majors and what that would do for extending the course of their study. Yet they were left to navigate the process of choosing classes and monitoring progress largely on their own, attending underfunded and under-resourced community colleges or for-profit institutions that charge dearly for degrees with questionable market value. And finishing that degree was really difficult. Of the 21 women who are enrolled in some form of post-secondary education, only eight ever finished. And those who did were unable to find better paying jobs. Home ownership has long been considered one of the fundamental markers of achieving the American dream. But owning a home is not just a marker of realizing that dream. It's also one of the most important assets a family can have. For these families though, home ownership could be more of a nightmare than a dream. And it was a real drain on wealth rather than a building block of it. The homes women owned were typically modest, one-story Cape Cods, built in the 1940s or 1950s. And some looked as if they hadn't been updated much since then. Carla had put a great deal of effort into getting her Westside Detroit home into livable shape. When she purchased it, the kitchen had no appliances, no cupboards. She received a lot of assistance from family members in financing the renovations, including the labor that they supplied. But because she was calling in favors, the work was done very slowly. A year after she moved in, the kitchen still wasn't completely finished. The countertops were still waiting to be installed, and the refrigerator sat in the middle of the room. Despite all of the money and labor being poured into the house, which Carla had purchased for $10,000, she didn't have homeowner's insurance. She explained to me, I don't even have homeowner's insurance right now. Because when I bought the house, after I signed, I went to go get insurance. And they was like, well, you could be trying to buy a house and then trying to burn it down so you can get the insurance. I was like, lady, look. But you know, that's what the story is for the city of Detroit. Carla reasoned that once she was done with the renovations, she'd try again. So the insurers would know that she was serious about living in the home and not trying to just get an insurance payment. In the meantime though, if any damage occurred or if she was robbed, she'd not be covered. We tend to think of redlining as a practice that reinforced segregation by deligning loans to people living in predominantly minority neighborhoods. Redlining and lending is technically illegal, I mean, it is illegal. But other forms of redlining still occur today. Redlining people of Detroit so that they're unable to get homeowner's insurance. Further, setting fire to properties as a way to file insurance claims was a practice that sort of lived in Detroit neighborhood lore. But it was one that affected two homeowners in this study. Lisa lost her home when a neighbor's house was set on fire under suspicious circumstances, and Marie's house was burned to the ground in unsolved crime. To return to Geneva, she was a victim of predatory lending. She purchased a home in 2008, although she didn't realize at the time that that's what she was doing. She recounted the process saying, I was going to rent, knowing that my credit was ruined. I answered an end of the paper and it was rent to own. So I wasn't sure what the program was and I went down and they told me about it. I was like, okay, whatever, that'll be fine. They'd take $100 off the rent and put it towards the purchase of the home. Okay, fine, that's good. And when it all came down to it, they said, you can actually buy this house based on your credit. And I'm going, my credit score is 575, are you kidding me? And they said, no, you qualify. She remained incredulous that she could possibly qualify for a mortgage, but she ended up thinking she wasn't going to be able to buy anyway, since all of the homes that the realtor showed her were too small. Except for one house that had a potential buyer lined up. But then the house became available. Geneva and the rent to own agent, along with a person that she referred to as a little man, went back one more time. Although Geneva thought it was just to take a look. She said, what happened next? The lady said, you can get the house if you want to. And she had me sign, I don't know what it was. It was just a book of things, but it was my closing. She didn't tell me that, you know? She didn't tell me we actually closed on the house. We sat on the floor in the kitchen and she said, sign this, sign this.  Then at the end, the little man left and he shook my head and he said, congratulations. I didn't know what he was talking about. Then she said, well, I think we're done here. And then she gave me a coffee mug. She said, well, you should be hearing something shortly.   She left and I look in the coffee mug and it said, congratulations Geneva, here are your keys. At first she was thrilled. Only later did she realize she'd been a victim of predatory lending. You know, she was the first to admit that she should have looked more carefully at what she was signing. But as she said, I thought I was just signing another million papers because I had been doing that the whole time, just signing all these different papers, you know, to check my credit to get permission to do this, to do that and the other. When she had a friend look over the terms of her mortgage, she saw just how bad of a deal she had received. She could afford her monthly mortgage payment but just barely. But what she had thought that the payment also included her property taxes. But those were separate and she hadn't budgeted in having to pay nearly $2,000 a year to the city of Detroit. The loan's interest rate was nearly 11% much higher than the 6% average on mortgages that were made during that year. By 2011, her house was in foreclosure. Finally, the public safety net is another area where social abandonment plays out. So when people lose jobs in the United States, we have a number of programs that are supposed to, you know, help buffer them against hardship during unemployment as well as when people are working low-wage jobs. However, the arduous process that these women faced in trying to apply for and use public programs demonstrates the declining public commitment to help. Just to be able to secure benefits and have them arrive in a timely and regular basis was a time and energy consuming process fraught with roblox throughout. So Rhonda's situation is an example of these problems. She's a single mother who lost her home healthcare job in February of 2010. Due to her low income, she received food stamps and the amount of that benefit should have increased to account for the loss of her earnings. In March, instead of going up, her benefits actually stopped. Rhonda was usually very even keeled, didn't show much emotion when we talked to her but in recounting the story, she got very animated. Her welfare caseworker had promised to correct the mistake and Rhonda ended up receiving her food stamps later in the month. But in April, her benefits ceased again. She called her caseworker repeatedly but the caseworker never returned her calls. Rhonda eventually got in touch with the supervisor in the welfare office and her food stamps returned in May then stopped again in June. In July, she was receiving them again. Her caseworker claimed that this problem was due to a glitch in the state's computer system and she couldn't figure out how to fix it but the onus of monitoring her food stamp case was placed entirely on Rhonda and Rhonda reported that the caseworker, instead of apologizing, took her to task for not letting the matter drop. Rhonda's experience was not unique. Women routinely reported delays in receiving benefits, mistakes that took months to correct and phone calls that never were returned. Employers also routinely contested the filing of unemployment insurance claims and other work-based benefits. Perhaps in part because the system's structure gives a strong financial incentive to keep the number of successful claims low. The taxes that employers pay go up when unemployment insurance claims increase. So sometimes families went without or they took on debt. People use credit cards to pay for basis expenses like food and gas but then they lack money to pay down the balances. Sometimes they didn't pay one bill so that they could pay another engaging in a very complicated strategy of juggling different bills that left them perpetually behind on everything. They also took on debt in attempts to achieve upward mobility to attend school or to buy a home but the financial products they could get had very bad terms and the debt was never paid down unless their wages or their tax refunds were garnished and that was an event that contributed to extreme financial turmoil for those who experienced it. So this cycle that families experienced not making enough money, losing jobs, not being able to quickly access the safety net and then going into debt coupled with taking on debt to try to achieve upward mobility, in my mind has some eerie parallels to the sharecropper system in place in the post-Civil War South. So just as a little history refresher for all of us, sharecroppers were farmed plots of land owned by someone else in return for a share of the profits from the crops. In the South, this was predominantly but not exclusively African-Americans. But in order to raise a crop, the farmer needed to purchase seeds, supplies and other items from the landowner and on credit. The high interest rates that many landowners charged for these loans and the unscrupulous practices in which they engage when it came time to settle up at the end of the harvest often meant that sharecroppers remained in debt to the landowner and needed to stay on for another season to work off their debt. Meanwhile, the landowner could sell the crop on the market for a higher price than the value that was credited to the sharecropper and the cycle continued. For abandoned women now, the wages that they were paid or the benefits that could replace lost wages were never enough or didn't come on a timely enough manner to keep up with bill payments. Employers control when and how much women work. The social welfare bureaucracy has a great deal of control over the disbursement of benefits and the credit card companies set the terms for borrowing. And in the end, families are left with debt when the money coming in is always less than the money going out. Families today use debt as a way to manage like sharecroppers did when they had to borrow in order to plant, to pay rent and to purchase food. Debt kept the sharecropper tied to someone else's land and today debt thwarts upward mobility. Debt is the fallout of social abandonment. Of employment not providing true inclusion, of education and home ownership not providing upward mobility and of the safety net failing, all contributing to the production of existing inequalities between the poor and the non-poor and between whites and people of color. So what could we do about this? It's the most people when I talk about this this is a very depressing picture and I wouldn't disagree. So in the book, I offer a number of policy suggestions and none of them are gonna seem particularly feasible in our current environment. Nevertheless, I think it is very important for the discussion to continue. So one that I'll talk about is a workers' bill of rights. We need some form of legislation that would better protect workers and shift some of the balance of power away from employers and to employees. So this is not an original idea. A number of advocacy organizations working on behalf of certain occupations like restaurant employees and domestic workers have proposed such legislation and the city of San Francisco adopted a bill of rights for retail workers. Provisions in these bills typically include a guarantee of a minimum number of hours a week, the ability of workers to have more input on their scheduling, the right of part-time employers to obtain full-time work if it becomes available and the right to organize. Also, a workers' bill of rights today should probably include an increase in our minimum wage. Second are reforms to the safety net, making programs easier to access and perhaps providing agencies with better automated systems and the staffing levels that are needed to process payments. The last thing that I'm gonna suggest is reparations. So of all of the suggested policy reforms that I go over in the book, I understand that this is probably the most controversial and when I raised it as a possibility with a group of Ford School students in 2009, it got no traction in the classroom. But since then, Ta-Nehisi Coates has brought the discussion of reparations more into the mainstream and the problems that the urban poor that Wilson described and the continued challenges faced by economically vulnerable African American families today really are fundamentally rooted in the legacies of slavery. So one possible form that reparations could take are baby bonds. This is an idea being advanced by Sandy Darity of Duke University and Derek Hamilton of the new school. These are child-saving accounts that are available to children whose parents have lower than median levels of wealth. It's a progressive system so that those with lower wealth get larger bonds and then the bonds can be cashed in at age 18 and used for a baseline for further wealth building in the future. So while families of all races and ethnicities have been exposed to social abandonment, it is a problem that we see particularly in African American communities. And the very institutions that once promoted opportunity and inclusion have changed in fundamental ways that leave too many families abandoned, lacking in hope and lacking in faith that those in power actually care about their plight. But social abandonment is something that can be undone. Geneva once said that people weren't meant to be thrown away. And we as a nation, I believe, need to find a will to bring abandoned families back in the fold. Thank you and I'll stop with that. Hello and we just wanna thank you so much for this wonderful talk. My name is Courtney Sanders. I'm a second year master's in public policy student and my interests are in social welfare and race and equity. Hi, I'm Kate Naranjo. I'm also a second year master's in public policy student interested in education policy and social welfare policy more broadly. So our first question is from the audience and it's were the women you met connected to community institutions and to what end? Not really. They were certainly connected to their children's schools and some quite involved in their children's schools but children move schools a lot. And that's no surprise to anyone that who follows what's going on in the city of Detroit. Some were connected to their churches but not everybody. When we talked to people about community organizations though there was this sentiment that they shouldn't be using the services of these organizations. That these organizations were met for people who were really poor and they weren't really poor.  They weren't out on the street living in a box. And folks realized that these resources were scarce and didn't wanna use them up when someone else might need it more. Thank you. So the second question is can you speak a little bit about the rising political weight of the struggling and despairing white working class? That's all in quotes. In the context of your research. That's a question I got asked a lot after the election and I actually wrote a piece that appears in Newsweek's online version about that. I do not in any way want to denigrate the individual suffering that any family in this country experiences. We live in a capitalist system that is inherently unfair in the way it picks winners and losers in the economy. That said, when we think about averages unemployment rates between people of color and white folk, especially white males, are much higher. When we look at income it is much higher. And I think crucially when we look at wealth the disparities are remarkable. And Trina, you can correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that the average wealth held by a African-American college graduate is much lower than the wealth held by a white high school dropout. These are amazing disparities. And wealth, whether it's wealth you hold yourself or wealth that's in your network and that's something all these families lacked was wealth in their network is something you can draw upon in difficult times but only if you have it. So I think, while again I don't want to make light of any economic challenges that any person might be experiencing, I think if we look broadly across the board these sorts of disparities are quite remarkable. This question is from Twitter. How is social abandonment different from social exclusion and lack of social capital? So I think social, and maybe this is in my mind different it might be a more nuanced argument. I think social abandonment is different from social exclusion because social exclusion argues that people are excluded from, it's much like social isolation, people are excluded from opportunity are not part of the mainstream. I think social abandonment is different because people are participating in what we think of as mainstream activities. People are working, they're going to school, they own homes. It's just that the institutions themselves have changed so dramatically that all those efforts don't promote any kind of economic stability or upward mobility. They have access to them, but it's just access to an entirely different set of institutions. Thank you. So with your use of sharecropping as a concept, do you see this as a parallel to the New Jim Crow arguments by Michelle Alexander? That was suggested by an editor of the book, yes. But I do, I do. I mean, I think we say the civil war was fought, slavery ended, but you can go through and just find all sorts of different ways in which racial oppression continues to be institutionalized. And mass incarceration is certainly a huge one, one that really affects African-American males. Social abandonment, one that is affecting folks that aren't incarcerated. This is a two-part question. Often academics and policymakers support the institutional racism and oppression by justifying neutral language instead of calling it what it is. Do you think your book successfully unveils the institutional racism and oppression hidden in the language we often call on policymakers to reform? And can policymakers reform current or write new policies that ensure the success of language of discrimination stops in America? I appreciate that question. And I will be, I'll be quite honest. When I first started in the business of poverty research, which there is a business attached to it, I use very race-neutral language. Everything was very much focused on how you could change incentives, the incentive structure, what kind of programs could you use. But over time, and I think, in part because of now being in a school of social work that has given me exposure to a lot of ideas that I don't think I otherwise would have been exposed to had I not sought them out. I've really come to realize that we had, that has to stop.  It happens because of systems of oppression and we do need to call it. Have I been successful in doing that? I've tried. But I think that's for other folks, folks to judge. But I also, I really believe that as a white person and other white folks in the social policy arena, we need to start doing this more. We need to call it what it is. And because otherwise, we're just kind of, we're perpetuating our own cycle of programmatic responses to something that is deeply systemic, structural and institutional. So the current secretary of housing and urban development, Dr. Carson, grew up in a low income neighborhood of Detroit before earning a medical degree from the university. He strongly argues that welfare programs teach poor people to be dependent. He may now supervise the termination of urban block development grants. Did you find any evidence in your research supporting Dr. Carson's hypothesis? No. Short answer, no. I mean, the story of what happened to Ronda, sort of used like, people couldn't be depended on welfare. They could not depend upon welfare. That's what the real issue was. And this wasn't just the case of everyone in this study was going to the same welfare office and had the same awful case worker. No, there were different offices. And sometimes these stories were from different states when women had moved. And I don't want to also in any way like denigrate people who work in those offices. It's a tough job. And our state and others have really just decimated the staffing of those agencies through a whole variety of different policies in Michigan early retirement policies and then not restaff them. So the workers who are still there are left with much larger caseloads. The same demands on their time and sometimes even higher performance standards to meet. But all in all, that just, I think, speaks to the pervasiveness and the depth that that sort of claim has taken root in this country. This question is from Twitter. I wonder about digital storytelling as an output for a woman's story. Could you speak more to that? I think that would be terrific.  You know, social workers, social policy researchers often find themselves talking for other people, other people who are systematically silenced. And, you know, methods that could get the words, you know, directly from those who are experienced in the story I think would be quite useful. I started this project using an actual like tape cassette tape recorder. So, and I improved my technology over time. But digital storytelling, I think would be something quite fantastic to explore. So, do for-profit online institutions of higher education offer reasonable placement services that really pursue openings for their graduates? Specifically, you mentioned the University of Phoenix. So, this is one of the areas that the federal government, at least under the Obama administration, had been starting to investigate quite rigorously.  And a lot of the institutions that have been shut down have been shut down for a variety of reasons, but one of the main ones, because they were over-promising on the ability to find students jobs. We have a new administration. We have a president who had his own for-profit, largely online educational institution. The new secretary of education who is quite pro-privatization of education. So, I think it remains to be seen whether or not some of those efforts are going to continue. Do you see any social programs that were working for the women in your study? Did they have hope because of them? Any that were working. A couple of women had children enrolled in Head Start. Some of their young children were enrolled in Head Start. And they assessed Head Start as being very beneficial to their kids, you know.  You know, and there's a whole body of research that says, you know, investing early is what we need to be doing. So similarly, given the current federal government role, given the current federal government's role, is there a larger role that state and local governments can play? I think it's going to be challenging. I mean, I think that the mood seems to be to push, not just, you know, there's this talk about devolving responsibility to states and localities and giving, you know, the local level the ability to experiment. And that's fine up to a point, but there's also a lot of talk about declining resources. So if I were running a state government or if I were, you know, on a city council, I'd be really worried about receiving pretty large funding cuts. So I think some of the work that has to take place in the short run is pushing back against some of that, pushing back against deep cuts to fund, you know, to fund tax cuts and pushing back against efforts to block grant programs like food stamp or Medicaid. Luke Schaefer has written extensively about this and can speak about it more eloquently. But when you block grant something, the logical conclusion that it leads to is just cutting the program and cutting it to its bare bones. This question is from Twitter. What types of questions would you like to see included in your survey? What concepts from your research do you think are missing? What do I think is missing? That's a good question. I wish that I had been able to get more of people's sort of life history. I got, you know, you talk to the same person for six years, you do learn a lot about them. But in interview questions, you know, that I wrote, so it's my responsibility. We really focused on like, what was going on right at the moment and what had been going on over the past year. It would have been nice, I think, and informative to learn a lot more about where they came from because certainly I got a lot of hints about, you know, some folks had really grown up middle class or working class. Their parents had good jobs. Their parents were getting, and their grandparents were getting pensions, you know, and these were things that, you know, they were never gonna be available to them. So how do we ensure that the most vulnerable populations are knowledgeable about workers' rights and other regulations that you mentioned? Yeah, I think there is a role for social, for policy-minded folks, whether they're in a school of public policy or in a school of social work to work with agencies and organizations that are trying to do labor organizing.  So I think, you know, giving people the tools that they need to organize and the support to organize is crucial. This question is also from Twitter. Can you talk more about what reforms to safety nets you feel are most valuable? So I think, you know, the first thing I would actually wanna do is rework the unemployment insurance system in a couple of different ways. First, and some states are doing this, it would be to overhaul a set of rules that favor full-time, full-year, higher-paid workers who got laid off. It is harder for lower wage, more intermittently employed workers to often to qualify. And I think there's also some evidence that people think they don't qualify. So also some education efforts about what the unemployment insurance system is. I also think that we need to be looking more into this employer contestation phenomenon. A number of years ago, there was a short New York Times article about a company that specializes in helping firms just kind of blanket, you know, protest the filing of any unemployment insurance claim. And you know, a lot of people who are eligible just give up because it just seems like it's gonna be a long, drawn-out process. And yes, they're right, it would be. So doing something about, you know, about some of these incentive structures, I think would also be important, or at least providing some other kind of temporary cash assistance to folks if a claim is being litigated. I think to, you know, it seems to me kind of unfathomable that in this day and age of technology, we can't have computer systems that can issue checks regularly. I mean, clearly we do it in the social security system. You know, so what are we doing right there that we could perhaps apply to a public welfare office? So you mentioned the ways in which the study is generalizable beyond Detroit, but were there any conclusions you reach that were specific to Detroit's unique policy and contextual environment? Yes. So one was, I mean, the sheer scale of actual abandonment in the city is, you know, is something that is unique to Detroit. And by that, I mean homes that have been abandoned, businesses that have been abandoned, or, you know, just empty parcels of land. The other thing that women talked a lot about was the phenomenon of squatting, which I don't necessarily think is unique to Detroit, but I think is probably a little bit more, occurs more frequently in a city that just has so much excess housing stock that isn't being watched. So, you know, people have kind of came down on both sides of the fence on that. So some, you know, really thought squatters were bad for the neighborhood, that these were drug dealers who were up to no good. Other people were like, you know, we should be encouraging low income, single parents to, you know, to move into these homes and rehab them, and if they can, you know, show that they're invested in them, let them take on the ownership of those homes. But, you know, that and sort of the degree into which people experienced a lot of theft of anything that had metal in it was also, so, you know, appliances being stolen, siding from the house being stolen, you know, to be sold on that market, I think are probably things that are a little more unique to the city of Detroit. If there is a conspicuous relationship between past historical imbalances and the current problem of upward social mobility for these underserved communities, then why is the idea of reparation such a contentious issue? Shouldn't we find redlining in these kinds of contemporary separate but unequal policies equally as outrageous as people being driven out of their homes? I mean, I can give my own opinion as to why it seems like it's so outrageous I mean, I think as a country, we just do not want to talk about issues of race. And, you know, even when opportunities arise, like the civil rights movement, or even more recently around, you know, issues around police violence against African-American males, like these provide us with some opportunities to really grapple with this history, but instead we like to move away. And I think the more time that passes, the more this argument of, well, slavery was a long time ago, takes hold and no one wants to think about, you know, the fact that all of our institutions in this country, you know, in some way, shape or form, you know, are built on the backs of people who were exploited. And that just seems like a really hard thing for us to do. And perhaps it's because we also have this myth that this country, you know, is all about individual opportunity and we don't really want to think about our own collective responsibilities. So this question is from Twitter. What inspired you to pursue this work? Oh, interesting story. So, in 2006, Michigan had, it was experienced an economic downturn. As it turned out, it was just, you know, sort of the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the country. But at the time I was doing a lot of work around the 96 welfare reforms. And for those who are a little less familiar with that, this was, you know, the reforms to our system that like impose work requirements. You make people, women, mostly have to work in order to receive benefits. And that was implemented during like an unprecedented booming economy. So I thought, well, this might be an opportunity to look at what happens with the safety net when the economy doesn't look so hot. So that was my original objective. But like once I, you know, found folks and started talking to people, it just, it became clear that like, this is not a story about welfare reform and like this now really tiny and insignificant part of the social safety net. It was a much bigger story. I mean, it took me a long time to kind of like figure out what that story was. And, you know, and you may not be convinced that I have it correct. But, you know, I came in thinking I was gonna do this little thing. And, but really, that's not what people really wanted to talk about. And that's not really what was driving on what was going on with them. To follow up, do you continue to meet with the women from these interviews? What is your relationship with them? Do you feel as though you have been a part of the process of community building with the women despite not being a part of the community and coming from a different perspective, a positionality, excuse me? I've kept in touch with some. More like over email or phone and not as much in person. I've lost touch with a lot of folks and can't find them, you know, and people moved, phone numbers, you know. One thing in doing this study is I, both myself, Teddy Engler, we spent a lot of time just trying to find people. But, you know, but we found most of them, you know, which was good. I, as a researcher, I've never really figured out like what my role should be in people's lives. So what I've tried to do is take the cue from women individually. So if people expressed an interest in keeping in touch with me, I have and we've continued that relationship. But there are a lot of other times where the distinct feeling or even, you know, it was even articulated to me that I got was, I was someone, it was okay to talk to me because I was not part of the community. They didn't want me to be part of their circle because they didn't want anything I, they told me to like come back around at them. So, you know, in these interviews, in these situations, it was, you know, I could almost feel, you know, when we were kind of closing out the interview, like it was sort of like you just need to leave now. And, and I, you know, I respect that. And I've tried to, you know, maintain that kind of distance than that people seem to want. So following up on the sort of specificity of Detroit, what do you think Detroit as a city government can do to better serve these women, especially amidst the gentrification happening in Detroit? The gentrification of Detroit is, you know, as Hazen is troubling to me. I mean, obviously the city does need revenue and, you know, it needs a stronger tax base, but it's continually alarming to me to like see the neglect in a lot of, not all, certainly not all, and I think, you know, organizations like the Skillman Foundation have invested a lot in different neighborhoods. But a lot of what at least I see going on at a higher policy level does seem to be about reinforcing the downtown core, making that strong, and anything about what happens out in the neighborhoods to be, you know, either an afterthought or not even talked about. I mean, I think one of the more troubling events that I participated in, I went to a conference in Detroit and every single panelist was a white male and all they were talking about was like bringing in tech companies and things like that and it's like, am I in Detroit? Something's wrong with this picture. Okay, this would be the last question. What is your final call to action for future social work and policy students who might be interested in similar work and what can communities members do as well? But I always kind of end my social work classes at the end of the semester and I did this with what I was teaching policy students to and I think it applies to anyone with interest is, you know, first of all, pay attention. Pay attention to what's happening. Be, keep informed about what the issues are, what's really happening and what's really happening on the ground. That's sort of step one. Step two is figure out a way that you can be involved. Figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are.  Movements need people behind them. So if you're comfortable being a leader and a rallying point, that's great. Maybe it's riding in an op-ed. Maybe it's becoming an expert in some particular subject matter so that you're the go-to person that a state legislator calls when they wanna know more about affordable housing or problems with the K-12 education system or something like that. Find your niche and then also find ways to make sure that the work that you're doing is not just being done upon a community but is being done with and for the best interests of that community. Okay, thank you so much, Kristen. Thank you. It was a beautiful talk about a very moving and rich book and please I invite everyone to stay if you can. Join us. There's a book signing right outside the hall and we very much hope the conversation will continue. Thanks to our question-askers also. Thanks, everyone.


Hey, this is Brett, and this 2017 Chevy Silverado 2500 Crew Cab Short Box is stock number 12972Z. I am here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, near new and used heavy-duty truck headquarters. This 2017 Chevy Silverado has the 6.6-liter Duramax diesel engine, puts out 445 horsepower. It's the L5P engine. It's combined with the Allison heavy-duty 6-speed automatic transmission. This truck has been fully safety and inspected by Elra Service Shop as a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off, and this truck is 100% ready to go. I'm going to go all the way around in this video, inside, underneath, start it up and take a look under the hood. This thing's in fantastic condition, has a really good looking, rough country suspension lift kit on it. Summit white is the color, and I shoot all my videos in 4K, so if you have HD capabilities on your computer, tablet, smartphone, or television, I highly recommend turning them on right now because it is your best way to check out the quality, condition, options, and cleanliness of the vehicle before seeing it in person. And if you like the video and how I do things here at Summit Automotive, consider clicking the subscribe button on my YouTube channel in the lower right-hand part of the screen, and then click the bell notifications, and you'll get updates on the videos I do each and every day here at Summit Automotive. So this one comes with 22-inch fuel-painted and polished aluminum rims. Those rims are in fantastic condition, and it has a nice set of hand-cooked Dyna Pro LT3 2550 R22 tires, and I'd say these tires have probably about 60-70% of the tread left on them. This one comes with BMS off-road shocks and a rough country suspension lift. You can see just how clean that frame and underbody is there. And there's the other part of the lift. All looks really good. Front fender is in nice shape. It does come with some projector lamp headlamps, LED running lights, and factory fog lights. Front bumper is in pretty nice shape. It's not perfect. It does have one little ding down there, but it does not affect the performance of the truck whatsoever. Headlight lenses are nice and clear. The grille is in nice shape. And you do get the cowl induction hood that is fully functional. I'll show you how that works in just a little bit. The passenger side front fender is in fantastic condition as well. I didn't see any dents or dings on there. And the passenger side rim is in really nice condition as well. I didn't see any major scuffs or scrapes. Now as you go down this side of this 2017 Chevy Silverado 2500, take note of how clean that body is, how reflective, and mirror-like the paint is. I take these HD videos so if you are far away, or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down, but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle, you can see the truck, hear the truck, and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here. So when you do get here, there's absolutely no surprises. And you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at. And if this video helps you make that buying decision, let your salesman know that you saw the video, that it was helpful, and that Brett sent you. His back rim is in excellent shape as well. No major scuffs or scrapes on there. And once again, if you like the video, subscribe to that YouTube channel on the upper right-hand part of the screen. Now the back tires don't have quite as much tread as the front tires. I would say a little bit closer to half the tread left on these tires, maybe a little bit under that, but still decent tread left. Frame and underbody is in nice shape back here as well. And it does have all the remaining factory exhaust, so it hasn't been altered in any way that way. Frame and underbody looks really good. Lower rockers and cab corners all look really good as well. Comes with a very nice set of factory chrome step bars. And those fender flares are all in very nice condition as well. Coming around to the back of the vehicle, rear bumper looks really good. No dents or dings on that. Does have the rear bumper steps. And this one, of course, comes with the full towing package, which includes a receiver hitch four pin and seven pin wiring. The tailgate is in very nice condition as well. This one comes with an X-Tang solid fold, fold up tonneau cover. That's in pretty nice shape. I mean, it's definitely not brand new, but it looks like it's fully functional and no major dents on it. Comes with a spraying bed liner and the bed itself is in great shape. And that bed liner goes onto the tailgate. It's kind of like a sticky bed liner. I kind of like the texture of it. Looks good and stuff's definitely not going to slide on it.  No major dents or dings on the box. And for full disclosure, this back rim is just as nice as the rest. No major scuffs or scrapes on there. Down the rest of the side of the truck, doors look really good. Cab looks good. Does come with the telescopic tow mirrors, built-in directional signals, LED side lights. They telescope out like so. They fold in like that.  There are no rips or tears. You get the 40-20-40 split bench seating in here. And those seats are in very nice condition. I didn't see any rips or tears on them. Power driver seat, factory all-weather floor mats. Does come with the auto headlamps turned out four-wheel drive and factory brake controller. You get the Z71 trim on the doors, power windows, power locks, power mirrors, and child safety locks for the back doors. Speaking of those back doors, we'll hop back here. Back seats look just as clean as the front seats. No rips or tears. It does have the latch child safety system for any child car seats you may have. Fixed glass rear window with the built-in rear defrost. Again, those seats are in nice shape. And you do get all-weather floor mats back here as well. The headliner looks like it's in really nice shape too. Side curtain airbags on this truck. And the bottoms of the doors all look very, very good. We'll hop inside and check out the miles, the radio, and everything that this truck has to offer on the interior. You can see that this one has 54,250 miles. You do get a digital spinometer and compass display. Instrument cluster is very nice and clean. You get the leather-wrapped steering wheel, cruise controls on the left, Bluetooth and information center controls on the right. It comes with that Allison six-speed automatic transmission with the optional tap shift. It does have the Chevy MyLink system, AM FM, and serious satellite radio capabilities. This one does not have the navigation system. However, it does have the projection manager where you can project your cell phone to the screen via Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. So if you have a nav system on your phone such as Waze or Google Maps, project it right up there. And it's like you have nav on the screen. So that's a pretty sweet system too.  That's for your cargo lamps. I'll show you those LED side lights in the mirrors. That's also how you turn those on. Downhill assist control and that's your factory exhaust brake. Down here is a 12 volt power point and then a 110 volt, 150 watt plug-in. Carpeting and passenger side format and seat are in excellent condition as well. And once again that headliner is in very nice shape. You do get map lights up there, on-star and SOS buttons in the rear view mirror. And we'll start it up and take a look under the hood. I'll also go check out those lights in the front. They are HIDs. You can see it starts right up. No check engine lights or anything like that. There are those LED side lights. They are extremely bright and useful at night when it's dark out. And I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video. You have been able to verify the quality and condition of this truck all the way around inside and out. There are those HID headlamps, those LED running lights. And under the hood we have the 6.6 liter Duramax diesel engine, L5P, 445 horsepower. Once again this truck has been fully safety and inspected by Elmer Service Shop as a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. And this truck is 100% ready to go. There is your emission sticker. So that coal induction hood, air comes in there, goes down the side, right into the air cleaner there. And I would highly recommend this truck from a quality and condition standpoint considering the age and miles on it. And to see more pictures of this truck or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SCVs, minivans, wranglers, half tons, three quarter tons, one tons, you name it. We've got to go to that website right there, summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations. All at summitauto.com. If you'd like to check out more HD videos, you can go to youtube.com slash summitauto.com. Number two, like, subscribe, and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. Click the bell notifications. You'll get updates on the videos I do each and every day here at Summit Automotive. In fact, in a second you will see a link to subscribe to my YouTube channel on the upper left. A link to more Chevy 2500 truck videos like this one on the upper right. A link to this vehicle on our website on the lower left and a link to one of our latest YouTube videos on the lower right. Click those, check us out. And we're super excited to help you with this Ultra Clean 2017 Chevy Silverado 2500 Crew Cab Short Box LT1 in Summit White Clear Coat with a Rough Country Lift. Thanks again for checking out the video. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on my YouTube channel. I really appreciate it. Thanks again.


Now that you have explored your topic and found research that you plan to use in your ENC-1101 paper, I'm going to show you how you can use the databases to obtain an MLA-formatted citation. All research requires that we use citations both in the text of your paper to indicate where you have used information from the research you found, as well as at the end of your paper in the works cited list. The librarians at IRSC can help you to do this and we have instructions on the library website for all citation styles used at the college. Please open a new window and keep this video up in a separate window. This way, you can follow along as I give you instructions. Ctrl-N will open a new window. Then if you click Restore Down on each window, you can place them side by side. Pause the video and set up your computer so you can view this video and navigate to the databases in another window. Start off at the library homepage by clicking Quick Links on the IRSC homepage and then Libraries. On the library website, you will see all the available citation guides at the top of the page. Next, click on MLA. Here is the Live Guide devoted to MLA style. What you want to do is download the annotated bibliography, which can be found under the tab MLA Annotated Bibliography. Click on the tab and then click on MLA 8th Edition Annotated Bibliography Template. Open the Word document and then select Enable Editing. This is a sample annotated bibliography that has already been formatted for you. You can save the template to your computer under a new name for your course assignment using Save As. Then simply type over the parts using your own information, such as your name, your course number, the date, and the title of the paper. When it comes to the annotated bibliography, you will be happy that you use database articles for your research because they come with an MLA style citation that you can copy and paste into your annotated bibliography to create a near perfect citation. In order to follow along in this process, you should open the library databases and navigate to the opposing Viewpoints database again. From there, we will email research to ourselves and get an MLA style citation to paste into our annotated bibliography. Pause the video now and go to opposing Viewpoints in the database list. Once again, find your topic and for the purposes of this tutorial, open any research article within your topic. Once you are in a research article in opposing Viewpoints, you will see an option at the top of the article to send to or there is an email button. Either one of these will work. Often when conducting research, it is difficult to replicate the same search later. So we recommend you email yourself the article so you have it saved for later. If you email the article to yourself, you will not have to find it through a database search again. You will also have an MLA style citation sent to you in the email. Let me show you how it works. Here is my article in opposing Viewpoints. Here is the send to and the email buttons. Click on one of them and then type in any email address that you want to use to collect your research. Then click on send and close the window. Now navigate to your email to retrieve the article and the MLA citation. Here is the article I sent in my email. When I open it, I can scroll through and see that the entire article is in the email. Then at the bottom is an MLA citation. Highlight the entire citation leaving off the access date and then press control C or select copy. Now go to your MLA formatted annotated bibliography template that you opened earlier. Highlight one of the sample citations and right click to see the paste dialogue box. Notice that there are several options for pasting the content you copied. This paper is formatted for you, so we need to select the merge formatting paste selection rather than any other options. The merge formatting option will keep the reference intact, bringing any italics over, but changing the font to match the rest of the paper in Times New Roman and 12 point. To use the research from the article in the text of your paper, you need to read the entire article and complete the annotation according to the instructions in your course assignment. If you need help with your research, your annotated bibliography or citation styles, please ask a librarian.