Winter 2015

Kathryn Edin has been an itinerant scholar of the poor for more than 20 years. She is a sociologist who works like an anthropologist, melding numbers and narrative to examine in illuminating detail the lives of poor people all over the United States. While conducting research at a Baltimore public housing project in the early 1990s, she encountered a household in which no one in had a job, nor was anyone receiving public cash assistance. This was a family with no income. "My first thought was that we'd found a whole new kind of poverty that we didn't think existed, and I wondered what was going on," Edin recalls. She began researching Americans forced to live on $2 a day. She did not know she would find 4 million of them. / Johns Hopkins Magazine