Evelyn Z. Brodkin is Associate Professor Emerita in the School of Social Service Administration (now the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice) and Associate Faculty in the Department of Political Science. She holds international appointments as Obel Guest Professor at Aalborg University (Denmark), Department of Sociology and Social Work and Department of Political Science, and Guest Scholar at University of Gothenburg (Sweden), School of Public Administration.
Brodkin is one of the leading scholars of street-level organizations (SLOs), the agencies at the front-lines of public policy delivery. Her research has contributed to the theoretical and empirical development of SLOs as a field of study for investigating welfare state politics, the politics of marginalization and inequality, political institutions, public policy and management.
Currently, Brodkin leads an international collaboration studying "The State at the Street: From European Welfare Crisis to the Front Lines of the Welfare State." This project brings a street-level perspective to the study of contemporary asylum politics, focusing on the advanced welfare states of Sweden and Denmark. It utilizes extended field studies to investigate the organizational arrangements and practices that form the realities of asylum on the ground in the midst of a fraught and highly-contested migration politics. The project is co-located at the University of Chicago, Aalborg University, and University of Gothenburg.
Among her other major lines of research, Brodkin has investigated contemporary and historical US welfare politics with a key interest in linking state-level and street-level responses to poverty and inequality. Her deeply immersive organizational ethnographies of welfare agencies have illuminated patterns of street-level practice often at odds with the imagery of policy and administrative reform strategies. She also has examined the role of governance and public management in the politics of social policymaking, issues developed in a variety of publications, including her book, The False Promise of Administrative Reform (Temple University Press) and the journal symposium "Putting Street-Level Organizations First: New Directions for Research (Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory) and numerous articles.
In a related line of research, Brodkin has elaborated a theoretical and empirical approach that places street-level organizations at the "operational core of the welfare state" and examines how SLOs, through their informal practices, mediate welfare state politics. Her co-edited book, Work and the Welfare State: Street-Level Organizations and Workfare Politics (Georgetown University Press), theorized the role of SLOs in welfare state politics and traced the advance of workfare-style policies from state-level to street-level in six countries: the US, UK, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia. Her perspective on street-level theory and methods is further developed in a series of articles, among them, "The Ethnographic Turn in Political Science: Reflections on the State of the Art" (PS:Political Science & Politics), and "Reflections on Street-Level Bureaucracy: Past, Present, and Future" (Public Administration Review), which received the Burchfield Award from the American Society for Public Administration.
Brodkin received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.P.A. with honors from Northeastern University, and a B.S. with honors in Journalism from Boston University. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Chicago, Brodkin was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and Interdisciplinary Program in Health and assistant professor of political science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
At SSA (now the Crown Family School), Brodkin initiated the graduate Program of Study on Poverty and Inequality and was its founding director, stepping down from the position in the Fall of 2018. She has been appointed to visiting professorships in the US and internationally. Visiting appointments in the US include NYU's Wagner Graduate School for Public Service; Hunter College, Silberman School of Social Work; and Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Research. Internationally, Brodkin has held visiting appointments in Australia, Denmark, France, Mexico, and Sweden.
Among her professional activities, Brodkin has served on the Policy Council of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the board of directors of the Chicago Jobs Council, and the editorial boards of Social Service Review, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, the Journal of Public Policy, and University of Sydney Press. Beyond her academic presentations, Brodkin's research and expert views on social welfare policy and practices have reached a general audience through collaboration with advocacy groups in Chicago, media coverage, public speaking, and newspaper and magazine opinion articles.
Her work has been recognized by the American Political Science Association (Herbert Kaufman Award), the American Public Administration Association (Burchfield Award), and the Open Society Institute, where she was named a Fellow.
