RESEARCH

Privacy, Poverty, and Punishment: How Surveillance in the Social Safety Net Penalizes Poor Black Mothers (under contract with University of California Press)

In my first book manuscript, tentatively titled Privacy, Poverty, and Punishment (under contract at the University of California Press), I examine how the provision of poverty assistance has become increasingly surveillance-centered in its approach. As a consequence, despite the sharp rise of privacy concerns among Americans more broadly, poor people of color are continuously monitored and tracked as they seek help—effectively being forced to trade privacy for public assistance. This book argues that this routine denial of privacy is in fact a central, undertheorized aspect of the punitive turn in poverty governance. Drawing on ethnographic observation in social service outreach programs in the Sunnyside neighborhood in Houston, Texas, and in-depth interviews I conducted with 67 low-income African American mothers plus caseworkers, administrators, and service providers, Privacy, Poverty, and Punishment reveals the multi-dimensional costs of being constantly monitored in the process of seeking help.

The empirical chapters trace the symbolic and material consequences of losing privacy in three key domains: the home, the self, and intimate family relationships—all spaces where privacy is highly valued, and also spaces where state surveillance is pervasive in low-income Black mothers’ everyday lives. In each domain, I build the case for conceptualizing surveillance as a mechanism through which inequality is reproduced, and demonstrate that the systematic denial of privacy both reinforces symbolic marginalization and exacerbates material poverty. For example, being intensively surveilled at home through random inspections and surveillance cameras creates an environment devoid of privacy that mothers liken to being in prison, reinforcing racialized symbolic notions of presumptive Black criminality. But being constantly monitored at home also makes it more likely that mothers will be exposed breaking a rule—rendering them more vulnerable to the accrual of fees and ultimately eviction, exacerbating poverty. Far from passive recipients, mothers develop strategies to navigate and to resist what they perceive as an unjust system, including pushing back and advocating for their rights, performing cooperation in order to avoid confrontation with caseworkers, and selectively concealing information. I show that these strategies help mothers carve out pockets of privacy in the face of surveillance practices; however, some strategies also expose them to punitive sanctions, including the loss of critical benefits.

Welfare and urban poverty scholarship has shown how access to public assistance has long been racialized in ways that uniquely disadvantage and punish African American women. However, Privacy, Poverty and Punishment reveals the analytically distinct roles surveillance and privacy play in this process, and advances our understanding of the often invisible impacts of welfare policies. This book brings rich empirical data to bear on timely questions about how the poor make decisions about utilizing the social safety net, what privacy (and its loss) means for some of the most vulnerable members of society, and the consequences of the carceral logics infused into the delivery of public assistance. Ultimately, I argue that the denial of privacy to poor mothers of color in repeated interactions with representatives of the state results in diminished social citizenship for an already marginalized group. Privacy, Poverty, and Punishment pushes sociologists to take seriously what privacy—and its loss—means for those who are uniquely vulnerable to the state’s expression of power. 

How Low-Income Families with Young Children Use Multiple Nutrition Supports to Maintain Food Security in a Policy-Lean Environment (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Equity-Focused Policy Research Grant)

This collaborative study examines how low-income mothers navigate food insecurity in Sunnyside, a historically Black neighborhood in Houston, Texas. Co-led with Rachel Kimbro (Rice University) and supported by funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Equity-Focused Policy Research program, this project explores how families pull from multiple food supports in the context of a austere social safety net. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 45 mothers and grandmothers, this work illuminates how structural barriers—such as limited transportation and restrictive eligibility policies—inhibit mother’s everyday caregiving strategies.

In one article, published in the American Journal of Public Health (2023), ““Emergency Food Support Preference and Usage During COVID-19:A Neighborhood Study of Low-Income Black Mothers’ use of School-Based Food Distribution and P-EBT” we show that mothers overwhelmingly preferred pandemic EBT payments over school-based food distributions, valuing the autonomy and flexibility these benefits offered mothers. In a second article in the Journal of Marriage and Family (2024), “‘If I Got It, She Got It’: Food Provision and Symbiotic Mothering," we develop the concept of symbiotic mothering, describing how Black mothers rely on interdependent kin networks and shared knowledge to sustain families under conditions of persistent structural disadvantage.

In a forthcoming article in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, “Place, History, and Food Apartheid: Reframing How Black Low-Income Mothers Make Ends Meet,”we extend this work by situating mothers’ strategies within the broader historical and political context of food apartheid under racial capitalism. Drawing on critical scholarship, we argue that food insecurity among Black families cannot be understood apart from the legacies of segregation and the deliberate disinvestment in Black neighborhoods like Sunnyside. This paper highlights how structural racism shapes both the geography of inequality and the daily labor of feeding one’s family. Collectively, this research offers a grounded and theoretically rich understanding of how Black low-income mothers navigate and resist food insecurity, with implications for how policymakers might enact more equitable and historically informed food and welfare policies.

Hillside Foodways History Project

A second collaborative project is a community-based research partnership with Food to Power, a food and racial justice non-profit organization based in the Hillside neighborhood in Colorado Springs. A Black woman-led organization, Food to Power operates an urban farm, hosts a no-cost grocery program, and is a leader in advocacy and outreach efforts around food access issues locally and beyond. In partnership with Florencia Rojo (Michigan State University), we have worked with Food to Power partners to develop a study on how Hillside’s foodscape has changed in the context of rapid urban change, development, and displacement in the area. In this project, we ask: how do elder Black Hillside residents understand, navigate, and engage with a local foodscape that has changed dramatically over their lifetimes? To what extent and how are cultural foodways—including farming practices, cooking traditions, and community gatherings centered on food—preserved and passed down intergenerationally? How do residents make sense of the role food and food access play in the community today compared to the past? This study is driven by our shared belief that the wisdom and lived experience of Hillside elders is invaluable and should be centered in ongoing food policy conversations that directly affect their community. This approach marks a radical shift from a more normative and often extractive model of data collection, where the desires of research participants are secondary to academic aims.