Ghettoes, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down & Out on the Silver Screen explores how American movies have portrayed poor and homeless people from the silent era to today. It provides a novel kind of guide to social policy, exploring how ideas about poor and homeless people have been reflected in popular culture and evaluating those images against the historical and contemporary reality. Richly illustrated and examining nearly 300 American-made films released between 1902 and 2015, Ghettoes, Tramps, and Welfare Queens finds and describes representations of poor and homeless people and the places they have inhabited throughout the century-long history of U.S. cinema. It moves beyond the merely descriptive to deliberate whether cinematic representations of homelessness and poverty changed over time, and if there are patterns to be discerned. Ultimately, the text offers a preliminary response to a handful of harder questions about causation and consequence: Why are these portrayals as they are? Where do they come from? Are they a reflection of American attitudes and policies toward marginalized populations, or do they help create them? What does this all mean for politics and policymaking? Of interest to movie buffs and film scholars, cultural critics and historians, policy analysts, and those curious to know more about homelessness and American poverty, Ghettoes, Tramps, and Welfare Queens is a unique window into American politics, history, policy, and culture - it is an entertaining and enlightening journey.

The social work profession calls on its members to strive for social justice. It asks aspiring and practicing social workers to advocate for political change and take part in political action on behalf of marginalized people and groups. Yet this macro goal is often left on the back burner as the day-to-day struggles of working directly with clients take precedence. And while most social workers have firsthand knowledge of how public policy neglects or outright harms society's most vulnerable, too few have training in the political processes that created these policies. This book is a concise, accessible guide to help social workers understand how politics and policy making really work-and what they can do to help their clients and their communities. Helping readers develop sustainable strategies at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, this book is a hands-on manual to contemporary American politics, showing social workers and social work students how to engage in effective activism. Stephen Pimpare, a political scientist with extensive experience as a social work practitioner and instructor, offers informed, practical grounding in the mechanics of policy making and the tools that activists and outsiders can use to take on an entrenched system. He distills key research and insights from political science and related disciplines into a practical resource for social work students, instructors, and practitioners looking to deepen their policy knowledge and capacity to achieve change.

The social work profession calls on its members to strive for social justice. It asks aspiring and practicing social workers to advocate for political change and take part in political action on behalf of marginalized people and groups. Yet this macro goal is often left on the back burner as the day-to-day struggles of working directly with clients take precedence. And while most social workers have firsthand knowledge of how public policy neglects or outright harms society’s most vulnerable, too few have training in the political processes that created these policies. This book is a concise, accessible guide to help social workers understand how politics and policy making really work—and what they can do to help their clients and their communities. Helping readers develop sustainable strategies at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, this book is a hands-on manual to contemporary American politics, showing social workers and social work students how to engage in effective activism. Stephen Pimpare, a political scientist with extensive experience as a social work practitioner and instructor, offers informed, practical grounding in the mechanics of policy making and the tools that activists and outsiders can use to take on an entrenched system. He distills key research and insights from political science and related disciplines into a practical resource for social work students, instructors, and practitioners looking to deepen their policy knowledge and capacity to achieve change.