Next Monday: Briggs on "Moving to Opportunity" at UCB Colloquium

MONDAY April 11th    
BLUMER ROOM – 402 BARROWS HALL
2:00-3:30pm

The Berkeley Sociology Colloquium Series
Spring 2011 Presents:

MOVING TO OPPORTUNITY: What a remarkable social experiment teaches us about theory, research methods and public policy

Xavier de Souza Briggs
Department of Sociology and Urban Planning, MIT
Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House

Xav Briggs, who is on leave from MIT, is the only sociologist on President Obama’s senior domestic policy team at The White House. He will discuss lessons and implications of his new book, Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty. Moving to Opportunity tackles one of America's most enduring dilemmas: the unresolved question of how to overcome persistent ghetto poverty. Launched in 1994, the MTO program took a largely untested approach: helping families, on a voluntary basis, to move from high-poverty, inner-city public housing to low-poverty neighborhoods, some in the suburbs. The book's innovative, mixed-method approach emphasizes the voices and choices of the program's participants but also rigorously analyzes the changing structures of regional opportunity and constraint—in housing, education, the labor market, and more—that shaped the fortunes of those who "signed up," regardless of their goals, preferences and choices. It shines a light on the hopes, surprises, achievements, and limitations of a major social experiment, drawing on sociology, economics, social psychology, anthropology, and other disciplines. For all its ambition, MTO is a uniquely American experiment, and the book brings home its powerful lessons for policymakers and advocates, scholars, students, journalists, and all who share a deep concern for opportunity and inequality in our country.

Xavier de Souza Briggs is Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House, overseeing a wide array of policy, budget, and management issues for roughly half the cabinet agencies—Commerce, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Justice and Homeland Security—as well as the Small Business Administration, GSA, financial regulators, and other agencies. He is also an Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Planning (on leave) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His latest book, with co-authors Sue Popkin and John Goering, is Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty (Oxford University Press, 2010).