Evelyn Brodkin

Evelyn Z. Brodkin is a Faculty Affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, a national and interdisciplinary academic research center that seeks to advance understanding of what it means to be poor in America. She is also co-director of the Project on the Public Economy of Work that aims to explain how welfare law and the structure of lower-wage work are creating a new public economy of work.

Professor Brodkin has published widely on issues of social politics and welfare reform. Her recent publications include: "Toward a Contractual Welfare State? The Case of Work Activation in the U.S." in Contractualism in Employment Services: A New Form of Welfare State Governance (Kluwer Law International, 2005); and "Accessing the Safety Net: Administrative Barriers to Public Benefits in Metropolitan Chicago," with Carolyn Fuqua and Elaine Waxman (Shriver National Center on Poverty Law and Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, 2005). With her co-authors, she received the 2002 Herbert Kaufman Award from the American Political Science Association for a paper entitled "Contracting Welfare Reform: Uncertainties of Capacity-Building within Disjointed Federalism."