Madri Hall-Faul, MSSW
Madri Hall-Faul, MSSW, is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Connecticut’s School of Social Work. Prior to starting her Ph.D., Madri worked for more than four years at an Area Agency on Aging in Louisville, KY. She worked on health and aging policy implementation and advocacy, including building coalitions and service provider councils to advance health in all policies in the region. Madri’s professional experience shaped her curiosity about the mechanisms of policy implementation decision making and its impact on economic wellbeing. Madri’s dissertation focuses on the role of social welfare policy design and implementation on social and economic rights fulfillment for families in poverty in the United States. It also investigates promising approaches to incorporating key human rights indicators like participation, transparency, and human dignity into policy design. Madri’s research aims to understand and change how policies create inequity, specifically based on race and class. Through both quantitative and qualitative approaches, she examines how specific state-level factors like race and politics shape and influence Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) implementation across the United States and in Connecticut specifically. TANF is an exemplar of a decentralized program relying on individual state design and implementation. The devolved program structure, central to TANF, is also characteristic of U.S. social welfare policy more generally; this makes TANF a valuable case study.
Policy, advocacy, human rights, and social work education are at the center of Madri’s broader research agenda. She has published or written manuscripts under review on topics including: the right to food and the incorporation of food justice into social work education; refugee resettlement policy in the United States and opportunities for expanded resettlement capacity; and the impact of peer support on doctoral student adjunct instructors. Her interest in social work education is reflected in her teaching experience, which includes practice, policy, and research courses taught in online and in-person settings. Madri’s work was funded by five years of graduate research assistantships. Her dissertation research has been funded externally through the Social and Economic Rights Associates’ Dissertation Research Grant, and at the University of Connecticut through the Konover Dissertation Writing Fellowship, the Human Rights Institute’s Graduate Research Grant and Graduate Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the Graduate School’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.
Research Interests:
Poverty and inequality
Social and economic rights
Social welfare policy formulation, implementation, and related decision-making
Policy advocacy and utilization of human rights-based approaches
Qualitative methods
Social work education
