Francis Fox Piven

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Francis Fox Piven will deliver the keynote address for our 66th Annual Conference. Dr. Piven's work is strongly connected to this year's conference theme of Social Media, Class Politics, and Mobilization. 

Frances Fox Piven's is a scholar-citizen, equally at home in the university and in the world of politics. Her Regulating the Poor(1972, 1993), co-authored with Richard Cloward, is widely acknowledged as a social science classic. She has authored/co-authored numerous books, including Why Americans Still Don't Vote (2000), Challenging Authority (2006), and Keeping the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters(2009). In those books she explored the interplay of social movements and electoral politics, as well as voter suppression.  Awarded, several honorary degrees and fellowships, Dr. Piven has held a number of visiting professorships in various European countries and executive leadership in the American Political Science Association and American Sociological Association, among others.

Piven's accomplishments as a scholar are intertwined with her political reform efforts. She collaborated in the welfare reform movement beginning in the 1960s and later promoted reforms which led to the “motor voter bill” in the early 1990s. Among the numerous awards presented to Dr. Piven are the President's Award of the American Public Health Association (1993), American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology (2000), and Charles E. McCoy Lifetime Achievement Award from the New Political Science Section of the American Political Science Association (2004).