Harley Rader - Social Policy and Intervention
After graduating with honors, Harley moved to Los Angeles where she currently serves California’s 37th Congressional District as a caseworker in the office of Sydney Kamlager-Dove. Often pulling from all three of her study areas (American Studies, Society and Environment, and Public Policy), she finds herself in an impactful position to apply the knowledge she gained from her time at Berkeley both through educating stakeholders and uplifting the voices of those underserved.
Area of Concentration Courses
L&S C180U: Wealth & Poverty
Soc Wel 185AC: Prison
Sociol 141: Social Movements & Political Action
Pubpol 117AC: Race, Ethnicity, & Public Policy
Pubpol 192AC: Social Movements, Organizing & Policy Change
Thesis
Muscular Christianity: How a Turn-of-the-Century Religious Revival Explains the Rise of Donald J. Trump
Harley’s honors thesis examines muscular Christianity from a feminist perspective and makes the case that it was a manifestation of the white male response to dramatic social changes that punctuated the final decades of the nineteenth century. She applies this understanding to the contemporary American landscape to help explain social conservatism, and even extremism, and argues that these two stories—muscular Christianity in the nineteenth century and social conservatism in the twenty-first—demonstrate a recurring theme of religiously-justified male dominance.
