Year 2021
Title: “Datafication of the American Welfare State During COVID-19: Some Cautionary Notes for Social Welfare Scholars”
Organization The CUNY Graduate Center
Project Type Research paper
Role Research & Author
Skills used Research, word processing, Zotero
Description
In Fall 2021 I wrote a term paper reviewing core concepts of datafication theory and its implications for a social justice-focused analysis of social welfare policy history, for the course SSW 71000: Social Welfare Policy I, taught by Professor Joel Blau, Ph.D.
In the class, I noticed a distinct lack in writing about digital technology and its effects on social welfare policy today, which was also absent in the MSW-level Social Welfare Policy course I taught at Hunter College. I used this paper to review several works along unit the class explored, specifically technocratic elitism in social policy, the political nature of inequality in postindustrial economies, and the enduring legacy of racism in poverty and social inequality in the United States. Texts reviewed included Ruhaj Benjamin’s Race After Technology, Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality, and Sean F. Johnston’s Techno-Fixers: Origins and Implications of Technological Faith. I wrote against conceptualizing technology as a sub-theme or externality, arguing instead that each of these texts and themes could be integrated into existing units and used in a future iteration of the course.