A Vicious Cycle: The Reciprocal Social Construction of Conceptual Frames and Public Policy

 

In ch. 4 of “Place Matters, the authors made the argument that much of the urban sprawl and racial and economic segregation we see in American cities today is all but the direct result of government policies.  The U.S. Government has a long history of proposing and supporting policies which directly result in economic segregation and the concentration of poverty in urban areas. The authors argue that many U.S. policies directly led to urban sprawl and the explosion of suburbia, which ultimately further economic segregation.  Furthermore, the policies which are in place to help cities or to combat racial and economic segregation are hugely underfunded and under-enforced.

This article closely paralleled several articles I just read for my Gender Politics and Protest class about the historical and social construction of cultural frames through which Americans understand notions of dependency, welfare, and poverty in general. In, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State”, Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon traced the shifting meaning of the idea of “dependency” throughout history, and came to the conclusion that dependency has an especially powerful radicalized, gendered, and overwhelmingly negative connotation in the modern American political lexicon. Due to the nature of this particularly loaded term’s application to welfare recipients it comes to morally define them  in an incredibly negative and stigmatizing manner.

We also read the introduction to “The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen” in which Ange-marie Hancock lays out a very compelling argument for how “public identities”  are formed and come to define certain groups of people. She explains that individuals’ actions are interpreted through preexisting conceptual frames which allow people to make assumptions and moral judgments based on “public Identities” which result from historically reinforced and socially constructed stereotypes. She goes on to explain how public identities shape and inform public policy, which, in turn functions as a feedback loop and ultimately reinforces the public identities. We certainly saw this type of vicious cycle at play in the “place matters” articles, not only in the discussion of welfare policies, but also in the social construction and maintenance of economic segregation.