Mary Ager
Associate Professor
Director, BSW Program
Mary Ager is a social worker and Associate Professor of Social Work who examines poverty in the U.S. as a relationship between social policy and the market economy. Her scholarly work covers consumer borrowing among people who are low-income, the neoliberal shift in social policy, and community-based interventions that make borrowing less costly and risky.
As such, Dr. Ager has produced works in the areas of financial capabilities, social development, welfare state theory, and multidimensional poverty assessment. Methodologically, she has furthered the utilization of social media in qualitative social sciences research, and pioneered a method that uses the social media platform, Reddit, as a data source.
Dr. Ager teaches social policy, social work research, theory, generalist practice, history and philosophy of social work and social welfare, practice with individuals and community practice. She has created three new courses, two on poverty in the U.S. and one on financial capabilities. Her mission is to train future social workers and social work scholars to be critical thinkers by using participatory classroom strategies. Dr. Ager has been awarded teacher of the year numerous times in the undergraduate and doctoral social work programs at UGA, as well as by the UGA Student Government Council.
In addition to research and teaching, Dr. Ager has several other roles and affiliations. Currently, she is the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Specialist and Financial Inclusion Advisor in a U.S. State Department-funded “Project to End Modern Day Slavery” in collaboration with UGA’s Center for Human Trafficking Research and Outreach. She is affiliated with UGA’s Center for Social Justice, Human and Civil Rights, Institute for Nonprofit Leadership and Management, Institute for Women’s Studies, Owen’s Institute for Behavioral Research, and is a Pride (LGBTQ+) Center faculty mentor. Dr. Ager has ten years of experience in paraprofessional social work in reproductive health advocacy, HIV/AIDS services, and youth development. She has six years of post-MSW experience in the fields of foster care and public mental health, in a range of roles including clinical case manager, policy analyst, program developer/manager, and community planner.
It was this array of work, combined with personal experiences with social inequalities that compelled her to pursue doctoral education in social welfare to ask essential questions about the role of social policy in the conflictual relationship between democracy and capitalism. In her spare time, she enjoys dancing, being with her family as they grow and develop, and spending time with her honeybees.
