Individual Listing

1217 WATKINS HALL
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521

Reese, Ellen R

Associate Professor of Sociology

College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Sociology


Biography

Ellen Reese studies welfare state development, urban politics, and social movements. Her book, Backlash Against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present (forthcoming, University of California Press), examines how and why a state-level revolt against welfare that began in the late 1940s became transformed into a national-level assault that shredded a critical part of our nation’s safety net in the late 1990s. Her analysis highlights how U.S. welfare retrenchment is shaped by the complex interaction of race, class, and gender politics. Her current research projects focus on struggles to promote the social rights of low-income and working people, especially low-income and working mothers, in the United States. One project examines the challenges and prospects confronting contemporary welfare rights activists in this era of retrenchment. Another project focuses on campaigns to defend and improve low-income residents’ rights to residential and public space in downtown Los Angeles, which are threatened by the city’s redevelopment policies and anti-homeless ordinances as well as the business improvement district’s private efforts to “clean up” the city.

Former Institution

California State University, San Bernardino

Degrees

BA Sociology 1991

Reed College

MA Sociology 1993

University of California, Los Angeles

PhD Sociology 1998

University of California, Los Angeles

Awards

Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Grant in Women's Studies, 1997
Jean Stone Dissertation Fellowship Award, sponsored by UCLA's Center for the Study of Women


Research Area

Sociology of gender, political sociology (especially social movements and welfare state development), urban sociology, social inequalitites, and comparative and historical methods.

Publications

Reese, Ellen. 2005. Backlash Against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10403.html

Reese, Ellen. 2005. “Policy Threats and Social Movement Coalitions: California’s Campaign to Restore Legal Immigrants’ Rights to Welfare.” PP. 259-287 in Routing the Opposition: Social Movements, Public Policy, and Democracy, edited by Helen Ingram, Valerie Jenness, and David Meyer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Aguirre, Adalberto and Ellen Reese. 2004. "The Challenges of Globalization for Workers: Transnational and Transborder Issues.” Special Issue: Justice for Workers in the Global Economy, edited by Adalberto Aguirre and Ellen Reese. Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order. 31(2): 1-20.

Reese, Ellen and Garnett Newcombe. 2003. “Income Rights, Mothers’ Rights, or Workers’ Rights? Collective Action Frames, Organizational Ideologies, and the American Welfare Rights Movement.” Social Problems. 50(2): 294-318.

Reese, Ellen and Elvia Ramirez. Forthcoming, 2002. “The New Ethnic Politics of Welfare: Political Struggles over Immigrants’ Rights to Welfare in California.” Journal of Poverty.

Reese, Ellen. 2002. “Resisting the Workfare State: ACORN’s Campaign to Improve General Relief in Los Angeles.” Race, Gender, and Class. 9(1): 72-95.

Reese, Ellen. 2001. "The Politics of Motherhood: The Restriction of Poor Mothers' Welfare Rights in the United States, 1949-1960." Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society. 8(1): 65-112.

Milkman, Ruth, Ellen Reese, and Benita Roth. 1998. "The Macro-Sociology of Paid Domestic Service." Work & Occupations. 25(4): 483-510.

Reese, Ellen. 1996. "Maternalism and Political Mobilization: How California's Postwar Child Care Campaign Was Won." Gender & Society. 10 (5): 566-589.