Policy Travelogue

Catherine Kingfisher is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Lethbridge. She is editor of Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women's Poverty (2002) and author of Women in the American Welfare Trap (1996). Her research focuses on policy, governance, personhood, gender, neoliberalism, and globalization.

• Acknowledgements Introduction: Tracing policy: translation and assemblage Chapter 1. The New Zealand Model at home and abroad Chapter 2. Producing policy in welfare offices Chapter 3. "Reading through" welfare policy in community service agencies Chapter 4. Working with policy in "real life": welfare mothers' engagements Conclusions: Tracing policy: process/power Appendix I: Key moments in state provisioning for poor mothers in Aotearoa/New Zealand Appendix II: Key moments in state provisioning for poor mothers in Canada and Alberta References

"[Kingfisher's] work is distinctive in taking policy from the minister to the client and service user. That is an achievement in itself, but to have done it in parallel studies of two countries is remarkable." * Richard Freeman, University of Edinburgh "This is a groundbreaking book - that represents a sophisticated assemblage of ideas to frame and drive the analysis of data gleaned through long-term engagement with each site - Using the well-delineated concepts of travel, assemblage, and translation, she explains the contradictory ways in which policy discourse is produced and through which traveling ideas 'touch down' in varied places and times and are selectively taken up by people in varied systems of social relations and grounded experiences." * Judith Goode, Temple University