February 13 Tuesday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center
“Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty”
Drawing on nearly a decade of reporting, sociologist and policy maker Nikhil Goyal follows three Puerto Rican children struggling to survive in the poorest neighborhood of the poorest large city in America. Kensington, Philadelphia, a place distinguished only by its poverty, is home to Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel, who live among the most marginalized families in the United States. In Kensington, eighteenth birthdays are not rites of passage but statistical miracles where coming-of-age is beset by violence—the violence of homelessness, hunger, incarceration, stray bullets, sexual and physical assault, the hypermasculine logic of the streets, and the drug trade. Live to See the Day confronts a new age of American poverty, after the end of “welfare as we know it,” after “zero tolerance” in schools criminalized a generation of students, after the odds of making it out are ever slighter. Goyal will be in conversation with political scientist Cathy Johnson.
Nikhil Goyal is a sociologist and policymaker who served as senior policy advisor on education and children for Chairman Senator Bernie Sanders on the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Committee on the Budget. He developed education, child care, and child tax credit federal legislation as well as a tuition-free college program for incarcerated people and correctional workers in Vermont. He has appeared on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, and written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, The Nation, and other publications.
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