Welfare mothers’ grassroots activism for economic justice

Several events during the course of this research – including the Great Recession, Barack Obama’s election and presidency, and the Occupy and student protests – increasingly focused media attention and public interest on social justice and economic inequality. Given the 2016 US elections interest continued to grow on these topics and sparked new attention to the role of organising and activism on social policy issues such as on health care, the economic conditions of working families, access to higher education, and the deteriorating social safety net. Through ethnographic research in the San Francisco Bay Area, this paper examines how mothers who pursued higher education while on welfare engaged in grassroots activism to reform social safety net policies. This project explores how they became grassroots activists, how they developed an oppositional consciousness and participated in grassroots anti-poverty activism, and the consequences of that participation.