Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy by Daniel Geary

The settler colonial roots and neoliberal afterlife of Problem Behavior Theory

“…The history of PBT intersects with other major storylines in the history of the recent human sciences that have explored how racism (e.g., Geary, 2015), classism (e.g., O'Connor, 2009, sexism (e.g., Schmidt, 2020;Vicedo, 2013), political ideology (e.g., Cohen-Cole, 2014), and shifting disciplinary politics (Fontaine & Pooley, 2020) have played into the coproduction of social scientific knowledge in the United States. By telling a critical history of PBT, I hope to contribute to a growing literature (e.g., Arvin, 2019;Burch, 2021;Waldram, 2004) that is analyzing how settler colonialism, too, has played-and continues to play-a role in the coproduction of behavioral scientific knowledge in contexts like the United States.…”

Mapping the Contours of Black Juvenile Delinquency: The Journal of Negro Education, 1945-1975

“…Controversy over the report came, in part, from its wide circulation and from its ambiguitypolicymakers, academics, and citizens could inscribe their own meanings onto it, grafting policy atop expert knowledge and circulating adaptive discourses. 24 The report would be central to Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and subsequent shift to the War on Crime. 25 As Elizabeth Hinton has shown, the War on Poverty drew upon a consensus about black urban criminality that had a direct origin in the urban unrest of the mid-60s, and it created federal policies that were meant to have a prohibitive effect on future rebellion.…”