Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Chapter One: How I Had Four Majors in College -- Chapter Two: Going Postal, Getting Drafted: How I Ended Up in Graduate School -- Chapter Three: How I Learned To Read -- How I Learned to Think -- How I Learned to Write -- Chapter Four: I Went Down to the Crossroads: Activism and Scholarship -- An Academic Crossroads: From Political Gerontology to Welfare Politics -- Chapter Five: Standing on Shoulders: Scholarship as Networking -- The Threesome -- Getting Mentored -- It Takes a Village -- Words of Welfare -- Do I Have to Paint a Picture? -- Chapter Six: Theory and Practice: Research and the Court -- Welfare Migration -- Re‑narrating Welfare Migration: A Statistical Project -- Revisiting Schram, Nitz, and Krueger -- Chapter Seven: Is Anybody Listening? Testifying before Congress -- A Minor Distraction from the Modest Proposal -- Testifying: A Question of Discourse -- A State‑Type Thing -- Chapter Eight: Calling Out Racial Bias: Images, Words, and Numbers -- Putting a Black Face on Welfare: The Bad -- Putting a Black Face on Welfare: The Good -- For Now: The New Jim Crow -- Chapter Nine: The Deep Semiotic Structure of Deservingness: Enduring Identities in Dependency Discourse -- How It Works -- Spoiled Identity in welfare Policy Discourse -- The Medicalized Self -- The Persistence of the Deep Semiotic Structure of Deservingnes -- Chapter Ten: Three Heads Are Better than One: Collaboration, Mixed Methods, and Disciplining the Poor -- On the Beach in January -- The Experiment -- A Theoretical Dispute -- Three Heads Are Beter than One -- Chapter Eleven: Moving On: Turning To Europe -- Chapter Twelve: Making It Matter: Real Social Science in the Neoliberal Academy -- Ships Passing in the Night -- Conclusion: A Postscript on Writing -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index.