Katherine S. Newman

Began career with studies of inter and intra generational downward mobility from the American middle class. Developed early studies of the working poor in the inner city, focusing on the dynamics of job searches, human capital development, and the cultural distance between working and non-working residents of poor neighborhoods, chronicled in No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (2000) and The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in American Society (2007). Developed analysis of the impact of regressive taxation on the nation's low income families in Taxing the Poor: Doing Damage to the Truly Disadvantaged (2011). Currently working on the impact of global competition on youth labor markets and the trend toward delayed departure from the family home in Western Europe, Japan and the U.S. and long term ethnographic studies of the first generation to come of age in democratic South Africa.