Valerie Taing

Valerie Taing studies how policymakers, bureaucrats, and advocates define the needs of poor families and the purposes of US childcare policy—and how these evolving ideas inadvertently produce new forms of inequality. Drawing on multiple types of qualitative data, her work examines how culture shapes the relationship between poor families and the state. She is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled Professionalizing Families: Childcare Policy & Inequality in America, which argues that the contemporary US welfare state operates by training and coaching families rather than providing direct services or cash transfers. This shift places poor families in contradictory positions, asking them to act simultaneously as clients, workers, caregivers, and service providers. These structural arrangements serve the needs of multiple political constituencies while deflecting questions of redistribution. Her book draws on ethnographic research across three states.