Columbia GSAPP; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:41, 19 January 2019 (UTC) · CC BY 2.0

A political scientist and sociologist, Piven built her academic reputation studying poverty and protest movements while remaining an active participant in them, helping shape the theoretical case behind the welfare-rights movement of the 1960s and the War on Poverty. She has taught at the CUNY Graduate Center since 1982 and served on the boards of the ACLU and the Democratic Socialists of America, treating scholarship and organizing as parts of the same project.