Sponsor
Portland State University. Social Work and Social Research Ph. D. Program
First Advisor
Stephanie Bryson
Term of Graduation
Winter 2025
Date of Publication
1-14-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Social Work and Social Research
Department
Social Work
Language
English
Subjects
Neoliberalism, Prison abolition, Social movements, Social welfare, Social work, Welfare state
Physical Description
1 online resource (vii, 169 pages)
Abstract
Social welfare is not a frequent topic of discussion in mainstream American culture. In mid-to-late 2020, however, that changed. This study analyzes over 20,000 public tweets sent at the height of protests over George Floyd's murder in the summer of 2020. Specifically, I focus on demands to "defund the police," which became the subject of sustained attention and debate across many scales and spheres of public life. Defunding the police was not just about policing and criminal justice; for many, it was about the priorities of modern society itself, including evaluation of what public safety means, who is responsible for it, and what strategies governmental and/or community-based entities might use to achieve it. Social welfare was a key element of these timely and expansive conversations.
I specifically sought to answer the question, "How does social welfare fit in public debates about defunding the police?" I created an original dataset of 20,000+ tweets and analyzed them using a hybrid inductive-deductive approach. Data analysis took two primary forms: first, I examined manifest elements of social welfare (e.g., the presence or absence of particular forms of social welfare); second, I examined latent elements like the sociocultural, political and economic contexts and assumptions that shape peoples' understanding of social welfare, including what is perceived as within the realm of possibility.
Findings indicate an absence of traditional conceptions of the welfare state. At the same time, I find a strong presence of counter-hegemonic, emergent, and aspirational conceptions of social welfare grounded more in community than government. These findings are interpreted through a range of theoretical frameworks, including: political economy; prison abolition; social movement framing; and cultural resonance in political discourse.
Overall, this study offers rare insight into the contours of social welfare as it resides in one segment of the American public imagination. The movement to defund the police is a critical intervention in political discourse with the potential to alter engrained beliefs and taken-for-granted assumptions, although the social welfare component of defund faces significant barriers to wider cultural acceptance.
Rights
© 2024 Kevin Noel Cherry
In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43147
Recommended Citation
Cherry, Kevin Noel, "Tweeting the Past, Present, and Future of Social Welfare: Public Political Speech, Cultural Resonance, and Debates about Defunding the Police" (2025). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 6772.
