Kathleen Powell
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About Kathleen
Sweet-Cushman's research and teaching focus on issues of women’s political representation. She is concerned about policy outcomes on women’s issues, with direct focus on how fewer women candidates (than men) translates into fewer women in elective office representing women’s best policy interests. As a research scholar at the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics, these interests are most keenly applied to Pennsylvania where women’s underrepresentation is acute and the state is frequently noted for its lacking support of women’s public policy needs. As such, she is heavily engaged in the execution of the state’s Ready to Run™ campaign trainings for women and the NEW Leadership™ program for college women. Insights from Pennsylvania are quite frequently transferable to more generalizable observations in American politics.
Contributions
Publications
Introduces a financially-focused model of debt collection in community corrections. We describe the characteristics of the people subjected to the model and assess this approach's potential advantages and disadvantages.
Compares different ways of thinking about fathers’ levels of “harm” to better understand variation in the impact of paternal incarceration for children – finding that conventional distinctions used by the criminal justice system may be less useful than those used by family-focused approaches for promoting children’s welfare in the era of mass incarceration.