Poor People's Movements Research Articles

Fighting to Preserve a Nation's Soul: America's Ecumenical War on Poverty

Fighting to Preserve a Nation's Soul: America's Ecumenical War on Poverty

On dis/possessive collectivism: Comments on Ananya Roy’s 2016 Geoforum Lecture

This paper critically examines the concepts of “dis/possessive collectivism,” “the politics of emplacement,” and “city's end” developed in Ananya Roy’s 2016 Geoforum Lecture. It does so by reflecting on global anti-eviction struggles, as well as theories of performative politics and racial capitalism, in order to develop—in line with the ethic of learning Roy articulates in her paper—how poor people's movements develop living critiques of property and liberal standards of propriety.

Justice by Any Means Necessary: Vigilantism among Indian Women

Through an analysis of news reports and documentary footage on the Gulabi Gang and ethnographic reports on the Mahila Aghadi, both of India, we illustrate how women who engage in violent forms of justice-seeking require us to expand social psychological concepts of retributive and restorative models of justice, women's agency, and community organizing. Our grassroots feminist analysis in an Indian context integrates: (1) feminist definitions of punishment and ethical violence; (2) research on perceptions of justice and moral convictions; and, (3) the feminist and liberatory roles that women's and poor people's movements play in the reorganization and recovery of individual and community values.

Realizing a Constitutional Social Right - Cultural Transformation, Deep Institutional Reform, and the Roles of Advocacy and Adjudication

The South African case of Minister of Health v. Treatment Action Campaign (2002) may be the world's best known recent social decision. Usually studied in terms of doctrine and remedy, the decision has been praised or blamed for its cautious approach to defining and enforcing social rights. But neither the court's approach to doctrine and remedy nor the case's significance for social advocacy and constitutional theory can be understood apart from the movement-building, cultural transformations and institutional reform strategies that shaped both the litigation and the Constitutional Court's response. This draft book chapter, drawing on primary research and extensive conversations with Treatment Action Campaign's leaders and lawyers, offers an empirically rich, theoretically informed account of these more complex dimensions of the 2002 case, its setting and its aftermath, to the present. This richer narrative analyzes the work of social advocates and social movement in creating political and institutional contexts that enabled seemingly gingerly judicial review and narrow judicial remedies to promote broad and deep reforms in social provision - bringing a constitutional social right to earth. The narrative draws together realms that constitutional theory usually keeps apart: cultural transformations in constitutional meaning, interpretations, and rights-bearing identities wrought by successful social movements; and institutional reforms and innovations produced by successful collaborations among courts, social movements, and other social and political actors. Theorized separately in constitutional scholarship, as practices on behalf of the dispossessed, these different kinds of change depend on one another. We call this a polity-based approach to social advocacy and contrast it with other approaches. At once a NGO and a social movement, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) led the decade-long struggle to prod the South African government to provide life-saving anti-retroviral to hundreds of thousands of HIV/AIDS sufferers in the nation's public healthcare system. It prevailed despite the obdurate resistance of the nation's President and most of the African National Congress leadership. TAC made the polity and not the courts its chief sphere for claims. It raised broad politico-constitutional claims and pursued broad programmatic changes and institutional innovations outside the courts, while pursuing a narrow legal-constitutional strategy. Melding the nation's new Bill of Rights with a grammar of protest and cultural contention inherited from the Anti-Apartheid movement and grass-roots empowerment and treatment literacy strategies culled from around the world, TAC built up hundreds of local branches and a poor people's social movement among HIV/AIDS sufferers. Treatment Literacy combined with rights education enabled poor South Africans with HIV/AIDS to participate in and make demands on their own and care - and to remake themselves into rights-bearing members of local communities, activist organizations and larger publics. By holding Treatment Literacy workshops not only in hospitals and clinics but in countless schools, churches, union halls and workplaces, TAC also succeeded in providing South Africans with a new public vocabulary for understanding and reckoning with the pandemic in the face of official HIV/AIDS denialism. At the same time, TAC's attorneys, activists, and its academic, NGO and professional allies pushed forward policy initiatives, programmatic alternatives and institutional experiments at every level of healthcare governance. TAC used litigation in service of these many-sided strategies to open up policy-making processes, to fashion democratic and pro-poor programs and policies, to prod government to implement them and to monitor its progress. While it used litigation sparingly, TAC's court victories provided invaluable political leverage and moral authority - more powerfully so than the scholarly literature of juris-skeptics or even juris-optimists would predict. TAC's polity-centered use of litigation, we'll see, has suited and helped shape the Constitutional Court's own understanding of the judicial role in adjudicating and realizing constitutional social via iterative encounters and collaborations with civil society and state actors. Much that is said about Treatment Action Campaign and South Africa's Constitutional Court emphasizes the distinctiveness of South African experience. But it's a mistake to overlook the more generalizable features of the strategies recounted here. Like many constitutional courts around the globe, South Africa's prefers to husband its political capital, to intervene modestly and in compelling cases, and to shun sweeping programmatic decrees. It prefers to help and rely upon civil society organizations and reform-minded political actors to develop the political and institutional contexts that make relatively modest, episodic and iterative judicial interventions yield maximal effects. This vision of judicial collaboration with civil society organizations and reform-minded state actors comports with what constitutional courts elsewhere seem willing to hazard in the name of social rights. Thus, this contexts-creating craft is worth cultivating in many places; and by recounting TAC's and the South African Court's collaboration in some detail, we have tried to convey what we have learned about it.

Assessing the Level of the Political Mobilisation of the Unemployed in Ireland from 1991 to 2005

Much of the current research on social movements has tended to focus on the general structural settings in which political mobilisation emerges. Such an approach assumes that political opportunities are fixed and constant for all movements. Recent theoretical developments offer an empirical opportunity to test such prevailing assumptions particularly with respect to ‘poor people's movements’. This article's objective is to apply such research methods so as to assess the level of the political mobilisation of the unemployed in Ireland from 1991 to 2005. In doing so, the article reflects on the extent to which such recent theoretical advances are relevant in the Irish case.

Ordinary poverty: a little food and cold storage

At St. John's Bread and Life, a soup kitchen in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, over a thousand people line up for food five days a week. In this trenchant and groundbreaking work, author Bill DiFazio breathes life into the stories of the poor who have, in the wake of welfare reform and neoliberal retreats from the caring state, now become a permanent part of our everyday life. No longer is poverty a war to be won, as DiFazio laments. In a mixture of storytelling and analysis, DiFazio takes the reader through the years before and after welfare reform to show how poverty has become ordinary, a fact of life to millions of Americans and to the thousands of social workers, volunteers and everyday citizens who still think poverty ought to be eradicated.Arguing that only a true program of living wages, rather than permanent employment, is the solution to poverty, DiFazio also argues a case for a true poor people's movement that links the interests of all social movements with the interests of ending poverty.

“Whatever it Takes”: Poor People’s Organizing, Ocap, and Social Struggle

On 16 November 1999, six busloads of people from Toronto, Tyendinaga, Kingston, and Montreal descended on Parliament and mounted a spirited protest. This demonstration would have been no different than any other march on Hill except for two things: this was a demonstration by homeless people and anti-poverty activists, and it erupted in violence with protesters attempting to tear down the barricades and the police responding with pepper spray.' This was the first time in Canadian history that pepper spray had been used on the to quell a protest. The demonstration was organized and led by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)--a decisively class-based, poor people's social movement organization.

LABOR HISTORY SYMPOSIUM

LABOR HISTORY SYMPOSIUM

The Success of Poor People's Movements: Empirical Tests and the More Elaborate Model

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Organizing versus Mobilizing:Poor People's Movementsafter 25 Years

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Retrospective Comments

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Poor People's Movements 25 Years Later: Historical Context, Contemporary Issues

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Crossing the Ocean and Back Again with Piven and Cloward

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

The Praxis ofPoor People's Movements: Strategy and Theory in Dissensus Politics

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Create a Crisis and Pray

ABSTRACT This is the second of three narrative interviews conducted with Richard Cloward. This interview covers Cloward's work at Mobilization for Youth, his anti-poverty efforts, relationship with welfare rights organizations and his work with Frances Fox Piven that culminated in the “motor voter” act. Cloward reflects on his essential ideas and seminal articles published with Piven in the 1960s that were developed in their major books, such as Regulating the Poor and Poor People's Movements.

Building an urban poor people's movement in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Building an urban poor people's movement in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran.

Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran.

Street politics: poor people's movements in Iran

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, an active political movement emerged on the streets of Iran's largest cities. Poor people began to construct their own communities on unused urban lands, creating an infrastructure--roads, electricity, running water, garbage collection, and shelters--all their own. As the Iranian government attempted to evict these illegal settlers, they resisted--fiercely and ultimately successfully. This is the story of their economic and political strategies.

Nongovernmental organizations in Mexico's Northern Border

This article documents and analyzes the activities of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) along the western part of Mexico's northern border. The research is based on fieldwork with 26 Mexican civic, not‐for‐profit organizations that promote social change and community development in the areas of environmental protection, poverty alleviation, and human, indigenous, and women's rights in Tijuana, Mexicali, Agua Prieta, Nogales, and Ciudad Juárez. Border NGOs are classified with respect to their activities and working style, focusing particularly on their relationship to their grassroots constituencies. The strongest NGOs are environmental groups, which in general work in policy‐oriented research and lobbying, and economic development NGOs, which mostly promote small business development. NGOs promoting a variety of civil rights generally operate with few resources and relatively little competency to carry out long‐term capacity building among their constituencies. The article shows that in contrast to NGOs in Mexico's interior, which have developed as allies of poor people's social movements, NGOs along the northern border do not have strong links with grassroots organizations of the urban or rural poor, thus limiting their effectiveness in promoting democratization and poverty alleviation. The author explores the factors contributing to the unique characteristics of border NGOs, including border culture and politics, ties to U.S. NGOs, and the recent creation of many border NGOs.

Poverty and Power: The Political Representation of Poor Americans.

[Poverty and Power] provides an unusual study of the politics of the poor during the 1980s...An account we need.--Frances Fox Piven, coauthor with Richard A. Cloward of Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare and Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. An altogether exemplary work that adds much to our understanding of the links between institutional and non-institutional politics.--Doug McAdam, author of Freedom Summer. During the 1980s the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. In 1981 alone, 70 percent of the $35 billion cut from the federal budget came from programs for the poor. Although the disparity in incomes has been widely reported, the efforts of antipoverty activists and groups combating the Reagan/Bush agenda have largely been overlooked. Poverty and Power follows the rise, decline, and partial resurgence of poor Americans' representation from the War on Poverty to the Reagan Revolution. Drawing on personal interviews and financial reports, Douglas R. Imig examines the political activity and organizational crises of antipoverty groups including the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law, the Food Research and Action Center, the Community Nutrition Institute, Bread for the World, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Children's Defense Fund. His findings delineate how electoral policy and economic change in the 1980s posed a direct threat to the welfare of the poor, and suggest reasons why no massive mobilization for social justice emerged. Still, the dogged efforts of advocates and activists culminated in the passage of the 1987 McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, the first positive federal intervention into domestic social policy since the Reagan inauguration. Imig helps us understand the complex relationships between opportunity and action that characterize all social movements. Douglas R. Imig is an assistant professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.