The Poverty, Promise, and Possibility initiative from the University of Chicago represents a bold and timely effort to bring together the University’s scholarly resources on issues of poverty in new, more publicly accessible, and more socially relevant ways. The aim is to highlight the useable knowledge available through the University for the purpose of illuminating both the pressing problems of poverty in our area and the practical steps that local communities can take to address such problems.

This event features Chad Broughton, senior lecturer in Public Policy Studies and faculty director of the Chicago Studies Program at the University of Chicago. He was previously an assistant professor of sociology at Knox College, where he was the recipient of the 2005 Philip Green Wright Lombard College Teaching Award. In 2008, he won the University of Chicago’s Faculty Service Award. Broughton’s current research includes undertaking ethnographic fieldwork in downstate Illinois, the U.S.-Mexican border, and rural southern Mexico to explore the ways changes in NAFTA have affected workers in these areas. He has authored several books and scholarly reviews, including Migration as Engendered Practice: Mexican Men, Masculinity, and Northward Migration (2008) and The World at the U.S.-Mexican Border (2010). He is currently working on the book Bust, Boom, Exodus: Global Tales from the Rust Belt, a Border Boomtown, and the Mexican Campo. He is a member of the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He received his MA and PhD, both in sociology, at the University of Chicago.