Social Welfare Policy in a Changing World

Recipient of a 2022 Most Promising New Textbook Award from the Textbook & Academic Authors Association (TAA)

Social Welfare Policy in a Changing World is an approachable and student-friendly text that links policy and practice and employs a critical analytic lens to U.S. social welfare policy. With particular attention to disparities based on class, race/ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation and gender, authors Shannon R. Lane, Elizabeth S. Palley, and Corey S. Shdaimah assess the impact of policies at the micro, meso, and macro levels. The authors provide students with a brief foundation in history, the policy process, and theory, while primarily focusing on helping students recognize the many ways that policy affects their lives and the lives of their clients and communities. Connecting description, theoretical analysis, and advocacy, this new text challenges readers to examine the development, consequences, and future implications of core policies. Students will come away with a newfound understanding of how to use the political process to address social justice issues and enact meaningful policy change.

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Shannon R. Lane, LMSW, PhD is an Associate Professor at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work at Yeshiva University.  She began her political career working for the United States Senate, where she was hired as a staff member for Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle while still an undergraduate at the George Washington University.  She received her MSW from the University of Michigan and returned to Capitol Hill to work for Senators Daschle, Pryor, and Nelson.  Since 2004, she has been affiliated with the Nancy A. Humphreys Institute for Political Social Work at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work.  She has worked with the Humphreys Institute to coordinate the Campaign School for Social Workers, a two-day training that has trained more than 1,200 social work students and professionals from around the country to run for political office and hold leadership positions in political settings.  She earned her PhD in Social Work from the University of Connecticut, and has taught social work policy, macro practice, and research at Yeshiva, Sacred Heart University, Adelphi University, and the University of Connecticut.  She advocates on issues such as health care access and gender based violence at the federal, state, and local levels.  Shannon shares her passion for political action by researching strategies to increase the political involvement of social workers and underserved populations, and has won national awards for her research on effective teaching of policy and voter engagement. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Social Policy and Research.  She is a member of the Council on the Role and Status of Women in Social Work Education with the Council on Social Work Education.  Shannon currently serves as Deputy Registrar of Voters in Bethany, Connecticut.  She and Suzanne Pritzker, PhD, are the authors of Political Social Work: Using Power to Create Social Change (2018, Springer Publishing).

Elizabeth Palley, JD, MSW, PhD is a Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program at the Adelphi University School of Social Work where she teaches social policy to BSW, MSW, and PhD students.  She received her JD and MSW from the University of Maryland School of Social Work.  She began her career working as a lawyer advocating on behalf of children with special education needs and families with lead poisoned children.  Following her experience as a lawyer, she returned to school to pursue a PhD from the Heller School at Brandeis University.  Her research since that time has focused primarily on policy implementation and the challenges that implementers, often social workers, face as well as the unintended consequences of social policy on those it is designed to help.  She has written extensively about special education, child care policy, and pregnancy discrimination in both peer reviewed journals and Op-Eds and is an editor of the Journal of Policy Practice and Research.  In 2009, she had a Fulbright to South Korea where she taught at Yonsei University in their Social Welfare doctoral program.   In 2014, she wrote In Our Hands: the Struggle for US Child Care Policy (NYU Press) with co-author, Corey Shdaimah.

Corey Shdaimah, LL.M., PhD is the Daniel Thursz Distinguished Professor of Social Justice and Academic Coordinator for the MSW/JD and MSW/MPP dual degrees at the University of Maryland Baltimore School of Social Work. Her work focuses on how policies unfold on the ground, with a special interest in how people charged with implementing policy work in and around policies that they believe are unjust or inefficient. She is also interested in how people who are targeted by policies work around them.  In the past ten years she has focused on prostiution policy, including prostitution diversion programs that target street-based sex work, dependency court reforms, and child care policy (often with Elizabeth). Because Corey is interested in learning from people who are most affected by policy but least often heard, her research methods almost always include participatory components ranging from input in research design, engaged qualitative techniques including ethnographic research and photovoice, and work with community groups about how and where to disseminate knowledge that will be of practical as well as academic use. Corey is the author and co-author of many articles, three books including Change Research: A Case Study on Collaborative Methods for Social Workers and Advocates (with Sanford Schram and Roland Stahl, Columbia University Press) and co-editor (with Katie Hail-Jares and Chrysanthi Leon) of Challenging Perspectives on Street-Based Sex Work (Temple University Press).