David Wagner, Ph.D., MSW

David’s work- both scholarship and activism- have centered on poverty, homelessness, social inequality, and social welfare history and policy. He worked prior to academia as a social worker, and an organizer. Among his service work, he helped form the low income group P.O.W.E.R. (Portland Organizing to Win Economic Rights) in 2001 and continues to work with  LACAN (Los Angeles Community Action Network) in community organizing in Skid Row Los Angeles and Housing Long Beach! in Long Beach, Ca. He works with prisoners and ex-prisoners in Maine through the Beyond the Bars newspaper and collective.

David is the author of eight books including Checkerboard Square, which won the 1993 C. Wright Mills award, The New Temperance: The American Obsession with Sin and Vice which won the 1998 Northeast Popular Culture Award, What's Love Got to Do With It? A Critical Look at American Charity, The Poorhouse: America's Forgotten Institution, and currently a new book with former USM social work student Jennifer Barton Gilman called Confronting Homelessness: Poverty, Politics, and the Failure of Social Policy. This book is available at this link.   Prof. Wagner also has a book entitled "The Miracle Worker and the Transcendentalist: Anne Sullivan, Franklin Sanborn, and the Education of Helen Keller," see link  at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=280260