Biography

University of St. Thomas - Social Work

Assistant Professor at University of Minnesota
Jessica
Toft
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Jessica Toft has been a faculty member since the fall of 2005. She teaches history of social work, social welfare, and social work education within the U.S., as well as social policy and social work research courses. She is the President of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. Her research interests include the impacts of citizenship disenfranchisement on marginalized groups, the effects of discourse politics on low-income women and persons of color, the effects of welfare reform, social work students’ perspectives on poverty, social work history and theory, and the integration of democratic Citizenship Social Work into social work education and practice. Selected works include the effects of discourse politics on low-income women: “The Political Act of Public Talk: How Legislators Justified Welfare Reform” in Social Service Review; the effects of welfare reform and “The Influence of Paid Work, Racial-ethnicity, and Immigrant Status on Health Care Coverage after Welfare Reform in Hennepin County, Minnesota” in Journal of Social Work in Public Health. Recent work centers on issues of race and democratic citizenship. She presented, “Social Work’s Democratic Concern: Alexander’s New Jim Crow “at the Council on Social Work Education APM and published the article in the Journal of Policy Practice: “Citizenship Social Work: A Community Environmental Scan of Re-enfranchisement Social Work Supports after Felony Conviction.” Toft is currently writing a book for Oxford University Press on a new orientation to social work that calls for social workers to consider foremost the extent to which marginalized persons are able to embody their citizenship rights. This model of democratic Citizenship Social Work maintains that the major issues of poor persons and marginalized groups are not psychological, they are political. Toft will begin a faculty position with the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2018.