Poverty Knowledge Research Articles

Knowing (in) organizations: calculative cultures and paradigmatic learning in the case of the World Bank

Abstract This paper explores the evidence culture in one of the key global knowledge institutions—the World Bank. Framing itself as a “Knowledge Ban,” the World Bank is a leading organization in data and evidence provision around poverty and inequalities, and as such, it shapes the broader evidentiary standards and knowledge infrastructures around the world. Drawing on a rich qualitative study of 46 semistructured interviews with experts working on poverty knowledge as well as document analysis of the key reports and strategic documents, this paper explores the manner in which the calculative evidence culture of the World Bank mediates the production of evidence and expertise within the institution. This paper explores the collectively formulated interpretative lenses that guide formative questions such as what counts as (good) evidence, how it is used in decision-making, and how to deal with uncertainty with data and evidence. By doing so, this paper makes two contributions to the literature on evidence-based policymaking. First, it provides a cultural lens to the production and use of evidence in policymaking, a lens that is significantly underdeveloped in the existing scholarship. Second, it addresses the question of evolving evidentiary standards and learning within knowledge organizations. By exploring how institutions “change their mind,” this paper provides a dynamic account of the evolving politics of knowledge within organizations.

Rawson Rawson and Early Victorian Poverty Knowledge

This article scrutinizes Rawson W. Rawson over seven years, from 1837 to 1844, during which he served as founding editor of the Journal of the Statistical Society of London and then as civil secretary to successive Canadian governors-general. Rawson studied poverty in London, amplified criticisms of Malthusian Poor Law disciplines in Scotland, and applied that logic to Indigenous poverty on the colonial frontier. The statisticians sought generic definitions of property and agency that sometimes challenged a more binary logic of civilization. But in Canada, Rawson's very critique of dispossession became an instrument of that dispossession.

Understanding the Relationships Among Poverty, Child Maltreatment, and Child Protection Involvement: Perspectives of Service Users and Practitioners

Objective: Despite the many studies noting the strong correlation between poverty and child maltreatment, the ways in which social workers and parents perceive the links between these phenomena have received little attention. Moreover, research investigating these links within a critical poverty knowledge framework and from a social inequality perspective is scant. This study addresses these gaps by conducting a critical, in-depth inquiry into the perspectives of parents and practitioners on the links and pathways between poverty and child maltreatment. Method: The study is based on 30 qualitative interviews with practitioners and families who took part in two child protection programs in Israel. Results: Based on critical poverty theories, analysis suggested the child protection–poverty matrix, which relates to both the multidimensionality of poverty and the ways in which all the dimensions of poverty influence parents, children, and their relationships with one another in their daily lives. Conclusion: The matrix illustrates the manifestation of neoliberal child protection policy in the lives of families and outlines how this social context might lead to child maltreatment and child protection involvement.

Dual Mediating Effects of Information and Communication Technology Resources and Family Satisfaction on COVID-19 Knowledge Among Middle School Students

Little is known about underlying pathways regarding how middle school students can improve their COVID-19 knowledge. This study investigates the relationship between subjective poverty and COVID-19 knowledge by considering a dual mediation model. A total of 328 middle school students were included. We used a multiple mediator model developed by Preacher and Hayes, using bootstrapping approach to include a first and sequence mediators. We employed the PROCESS macro 3.4 for SPSS to test the dual mediating effects. Both Information and Communication Technology (ICT) resources and family satisfaction mediated the association between subjective poverty and knowledge about COVID-19. Further, an indirect effect of subjective poverty via the dual mediators of ICT resources and family satisfaction was found. Further, middle school students who more satisfied with their family dynamics and who had more ICT resources were more likely to have greater levels of knowledge about COVID-19. This study contributes to further understanding of pathways between subjective poverty and COVID-19 knowledge in the context of dual mediators. It is imperative to help households in poverty before and since COVID-19; specific financial supports that focus on ICT resources should be provided to increase middle school students’ quality of online learning, which then helps to improve family satisfaction. The pathways influence COVID-19 knowledge.

The ethical dilemmas of foodbanking: an analysis of the More Than Food programme

This article contributes to debates about the ethicality of foodbanks, a pervasive element of the UK welfare support infrastructure. Drawing on qualitative interview data, we use the concepts of ‘food poverty knowledge’ and ‘lay morality’ to analyse the narratives of those running a major Trussell Trust ‘foodbank-plus’ programme and explore inherent moral sentiments therein about how those who are in food poverty are understood. We identify a contradiction between foodbankers’ ‘structural’ understanding of poverty and the implicitly agential assumptions that underpin the programme. We suggest that this represents a precarious ethical position on which to base practice.

Knowing poverty: Social workers’ perceptions of poverty knowledge

Summary Given the global and local social inequalities and the complex life circumstances of people living in poverty, social workers are called upon to broaden their knowledge with the purpose of developing social services that respond to the needs of this growing population. However, very little research has been done on the kind of knowledge that social workers require in order to care for this population. The present article focuses on the epistemological aspects of service development for people living in poverty and reviews three main issues: What is “poverty knowledge,” where does it come from, and what are the barriers to and opportunities for its development? These questions are investigated through a qualitative paradigm among social workers employed in Israel’s public social services. Findings Findings reveal a profound epistemological controversy about what poverty knowledge means: Is it objective, consistent, readily available, and transferrable knowledge, or is it a dynamic and reflexive process affected by a great number of fluctuating contexts? Findings stress the dominance of positivist views of poverty knowledge, mostly derived from practice while other sources of knowledge development, such as service users’ local knowledge, theory, and research knowledge were seen as less relevant to their needs. Applications Practical recommendations are offered relating to the need for poverty knowledge development processes in social services as well as in social-work education through collaborative, contextual, and reflective learning with and from service users and other stakeholders.

Raised within Government Walls: The Early Years of Program Evaluation in the US

Not much equates Michael Harrington, Dwight MacDonald, Orley Ashenfelter and James Heckman. But still history made a way to have, in one end of a story, a narrative journalist and a political scientist and, in the other, two economists. Harrington’s famous piece, The Other America, made its way into government through MacDonald’s extensive review in what could have been just another edition of the New Yorker in that January of 1963. MacDonald’s lines ended up in John Kennedy’s hands – or so the tale tells – and poverty made its way inside governmental concerns. “Poverty knowledge”, then, spin and turned for 15 years for in one of its ramifications to conceive the field of microeconometrics. Poverty went from a campaign theme to an unconditional war, from unmeasurable to fashionable. It travelled through the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Economic Opportunity, to the Department of Labor and teaching rooms of universities. It finally reached the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy, Evaluation and Research (ASPER), where it became econometric policy evaluation and microeconometrics, embodied in the papers of Ashenfelter and Heckman in the late 70s. This paper intends to shed some light in this journey towards microeconometrics.

Poverty Awareness: Development and Validation of a New Scale for Examining Attitudes regarding the Aetiology and Relational–Symbolic Aspects of Poverty

Abstract This study describes the development and validation of a new Poverty Awareness Scale (PAS). Existing scales of attitudes towards poverty focus on poverty’s aetiology, leaving other notions regarding poverty underexplored. Our new scale is based on the key role that relational–symbolic aspects of poverty play in current critical poverty knowledge and adds the examination of these aspects. The scale was distributed to 127 social workers and social work students before and after six different poverty-aware courses in Israel. For psychometric validation, we calculated the internal consistency of the construction of the scale dimensions and of the relationships between them. The scale evinced high levels of internal consistency. Construct validity was established through correlational analyses between our scale and a xenophobia scale. In addition, we found a significant difference in attitudes between the pre- and post-poverty-aware courses, with participants altering their attitudes in the direction of explanations that were more structural and exhibiting increased awareness of the relational symbolic aspects of poverty. The new PAS has the potential to be useful for service training and social work education.

Problematic Global Metrics

An added benefit of doing library instruction is you learn things from students and faculty. This knowledge informs both collection development and research consultations. It is especially interesting when a new faculty member arrives and issues a revised syllabus for a popular course. One such class at UC Berkeley is in the Global Poverty and Practice (GPP) minor, founded by Professor Ananya Roy ten years ago. Her book, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, makes the uncomfortable point that people and institutions profit from poverty: it is a lucrative business. But there are also those who attempt to create and influence “poverty knowledge.” The 1998 subtitle of the World Bank’s flagship publication, the World Development Report, was “Knowledge for Development.” In 2017 the World Bank wrote a feature news article (about itself) as a “knowledge institution.” There are articles that trace the history of the World Bank’s vision of itself as a “knowledge bank,” a term I find both amusing (do they charge “interest”?) and problematic. Yet a library is also a knowledge institution, and what we purchase or recommend influences the thinking and research of students and scholars.

Towards a relational understanding of child poverty: Care and adverse inclusion among street-affiliated children in Peru

In this article, I draw on insights from relational poverty scholars to show how uneven power to shape representations of child poverty, alongside ongoing political, economic and social relationships, is key to understanding the (re)production of children's poverty in Peru. Representations of child poverty have consequences for children's wellbeing, particular services young people can access, and understandings of the deservingness of particular children (and their families). Young people's contestations of the meaning and categories of poverty reveal limitations of normative poverty discourses about the relationship between children's labor, the streets and poverty. At the same time, young people also internalize and uphold some of the subtler ways in which poverty is (re)produced. Listening to young people's accounts of their own poverty challenge conceptualizations of child poverty as a bounded problem of individuals or whole countries, and instead recognizes the role specific caring relationships can play in challenging, producing and maintaining poverty. A relational analysis of child poverty offers theoretical and practical insights into the (re)production of poverty, and works to unsettle some of the uneven ways in which poverty knowledge is produced. The research is based on 14 months of interviews, informal conversations, engaging in drawing and games, and participatory observation with street-affiliated children in Lima Peru in 2009 and 2010, as well as follow-up research in 2011 and 2014.

From builders to their tools: crafting ‘poverty knowledge’ from “the Moynihan Report” to today

ABSTRACT Critics often cite the “Moynihan Report” to illustrate how cultural diagnoses of poverty blame the victims and ignore the structural roots of inequality. This paper considers how the tendency to attribute such dangerous analyses to researchers’ individual shortcomings leaves the underlying analytical elements that generate cultural diagnoses. Rather than focus on those who build “poverty knowledge,” we advocate for more attention to the analytical tools that continue to encourage cultural diagnoses today. We use the “Moynihan Report” as a mirror in which we can see how static theories of culture and atomistic units of analysis encourage cultural diagnoses. They obscure the ongoing, collective work of reproducing inequality, including the work of race-making and racialization which help sustain economic exploitation, making it dangerously easy to locate blame and responsibility on particular persons or groups of persons. Transgressing the roots of inequity requires a relentless confrontation with these analytical tools.

Redistribution in an Age of Neoliberalism: Market Economics, ‘Poverty Knowledge’, and the Growth of Working-Age Benefits in Britain, c. 1979–2010

The expansion of cash benefits to low-paid workers has been one of the most significant developments in recent UK public policy. Since 1979, transfer payments to working-age households have trebled in real terms, helping to offset increases in wage inequality. Adopting a discursive institutionalist approach, this article argues that the growth of transfer payments partly reflects the influence of what John Kay has called ‘Redistributive Market Liberalism’ – the belief that poverty and inequality are best alleviated through income transfers outside the market. Although its roots can be traced back to the 1940s, Redistributive Market Liberalism came to the fore after 1979 in the context of a reaction against trade union power and renewed confidence in neoclassical microeconomics, and reached its apogee in New Labour’s child poverty strategy. The 2008 financial crisis, however, appears to have disrupted the ascendancy of this free-market philosophy and prompted a return to more interventionist forms of distributional politics.

The arts of poverty politics: Real Change

ABSTRACT This paper explores disruptive poverty politics arising from creative activisms that challenge homelessness/impoverishment. We analyze forms and potentials of creative activisms that challenge hegemonic meanings and practices around impoverishment. Bringing together geographers’ work on creative activisms, geographies of art, and the dialectics of thinkable and unthinkable poverty politics; we analyze activism by Real Change, a Seattle economic and racial justice organization confronting the city’s shelter crisis. We argue that creative poverty activism produces performative encounters that challenge exclusionary space-making and create political connections between people experiencing poverty and those who are not. Using portraiture and public art/performance, activists disrupt normative sights, practices, and socio-spatial relations on which poverty knowledge rests in public spaces. These interventions re-script spaces of privilege produced through capitalist relations of dispossession and exclusion, and the ideological projects that undergird them. Disruptive poverty politics create encounters across socio-spatial difference that challenge privileged subjects, raise new voices, and create previously unimaginable political forms. Our analysis extends prior work on visual poverty politics that has theorized the reproduction of hegemonic poverty politics (of difference, blame, stigma, individualized causes) through representational practices. We extend relational poverty analysis into the realm of the visual, performative, and creative, revealing new sites, forms, and possibilities of disruptive poverty politics.

Same problem, conflicting ‘truths’: rethinking the missing links in forest degradation narrativization in Ghana

This paper uses narrative analysis drawing on secondary data from policy documents, reports, and academic literature to examine contemporary discourses on forest degradation in Ghana. Situating the analysis within science and policy-making, we identify the actors, corresponding storylines, and demonstrate how the knowledge produced shapes forest policy. We find that, external voices dominate forest degradation narrativization in Ghana. Amid conflicting statistics on the extent and rate of forest loss, local farmers are tagged as both villains and victims of degradation to which prescriptive technocratic solutions preoccupied with merely replacing trees are prioritized while neglecting underlying poverty and indigenous knowledge systems

The global rural: Relational geographies of poverty and uneven development

AbstractThis paper explores rural poverty through a relational lens, arguing that new spatial patterns of poverty stemming from global economic transformations call for a relational approach; one that draws attention to the importance of global integration while recognizing that places are absorbed differently and unevenly into circuits of capital accumulation. The spread of neoliberalism has reconfigured rural spaces, and the production of poverty knowledge reinforces this uneven spatiality. We address recent literature extending the critical analysis of poverty and welfare in the Global North to the production of poverty knowledge and development practice globally. We examine the various technologies of power that ask the subjects of rural poverty to be empowered, moral, and market‐oriented subjects. This attention to how rural poverty is governed and how rural subjects are inserted into the project of development highlights the distinct role of rural spaces in relation to poverty studies. We emphasize the spatially and temporally disjointed ways in which rural spaces and subjectivities are reconfigured, calling for greater attention to ethnographic accounts of the lived experiences of poverty. We argue for a reconsideration the “global rural” in processes of uneven development.

The development language: BPL category and the poverty discourse in contemporary India

ABSTRACTThe paper highlights the complex relationship between development and language and argues that poverty as a condition of underdevelopment is materialized in representation. Instead of limiting the scope of the topic to the rhetorical aspects of development thought, it is proposed that development language produces a specific reality of poverty while writing about it. Using a post-structuralist framework and drawing from various Planning Commission reports on poverty lines, the paper goes on to implicate these reports in the production of authoritative knowledge and the elision of the poor. Through the identification of the cut-off line, which distinguishes the poor from the non-poor, these reports control our ways of knowing and suspend our ability to imagine poverty in any non-institutional manner. Such representation not only omits poor’s everyday experience and converts poverty as experience to poverty as knowledge, but also predicates its objectivity on such elision. The paper also highlights the slippages and contradictions in these reports, and shows how in the seeming inevitability of poverty knowledge, people find innovative ways to appropriate and disrupt it.

Poverty knowledge and action research: Lessons from the Ramanagaram Financial Diaries

This piece is an attempt to synthesize our learnings about poverty and action research using the financial diaries methodology among the urban poor at Ramanagaram, a town 60 km away from Bangalore, India. We introduced a participatory component in the financial diaries methodology by asking our respondents (all women) to be the diary writers. This helped narrowing the gap between the researchers and researched towards understanding data on the lives of the poor. It spurred an on-going relationship with our diary writers and enabled us to take a critical look at several mainstream conclusions about poverty. For example, eating out and expenditure on snacks by women, especially in women-headed households is not to be considered a temptation good but an expense arising from the informal nature of her employment, allowing her little time towards household chores. Similarly, buying a TV (sometimes by borrowing money) was often prompted by the drudgery of onerous job–work done from home, rather than from the need to emulate the Joneses. A small self-help livelihoods venture grew out of the interaction, which we helped setup. This study reinforces the need to have more action research with the poor, if meaningful solutions need be sought to their problems.

Making the Visible Invisible

The year 2016 marks the 100th anniversary of the American Educational Research Association and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Equality of Educational Opportunity, known as the Coleman Report. These key moments in the field’s history ushered in important paradigm shifts in the practice of education research; in how the relationships among poverty, inequality, and schooling were understood; and in the research-policy nexus. This conceptual synthesis of the history of education research in the United States is focused on poverty knowledge in both periods. The authors trace the rise of education as a field of study, the place of poverty in the emergent science of education, and the extent to which leading researchers have acknowledged, analyzed, or contested poverty. The Coleman Report advanced a new paradigm for analysis while being firmly rooted in earlier traditions. Coleman’s analytical approach has become common sense in educational policymaking in the form of the accountability movement. The report’s fundamental insights about the relationship between poverty and student achievement too often remain unacknowledged by U.S. policymakers.

Poverty knowledge in South Africa: a social history of human science, 1855-2005

Poverty is South Africa's greatest challenge. But what is 'poverty'? How can it be measured? And how can it be reduced if not eliminated? In South Africa, human science knowledge about the cost of living grew out of colonialism, industrialization, apartheid and civil resistance campaigns, which makes this knowledge far from neutral or apolitical. South Africans have used the Poverty Datum Line (PDL), Gini coefficients and other poverty thresholds to petition the state, to chip away at the pillars of white supremacy, and, more recently, to criticize the postapartheid government's failures to deliver on some of its promises. Rather than promoting one particular policy solution, this book argues that poverty knowledge teaches us about the dynamics of historical change, the power of racism in white settler societies, and the role of grassroots protest movements in shaping state policies and scientific categories. Readers will gain new perspectives on today's debates about social welfare, redistribution and human rights, and will ultimately find reasons to rethink conventional approaches to advocacy.

Intellectual inheritances: Cultural diagnostics and the state of poverty knowledge

What factors influence the scholarly field of vision, its illuminations and omissions? Reflexive interventions have typically addressed this question via analyses of knowledge producers and their institutional contexts. In contrast, this article foregrounds the inherited cultural infrastructures that enable and constrain knowledge production. I propose a ‘cultural diagnostics’ approach to identify and explain the persistence of what I label ‘ontological myopias’, a type of intellectual constriction rooted in assumptions about the content and composition of the social world. To illustrate the purchase of this analytic strategy, I examine the case of the emerging cultural sociology of poverty. Cultural diagnostics reveal that recent works have, with few exceptions, inherited an underlying presumption of earlier cultural approaches, namely that the ‘poor’ and their lifeworlds should constitute the principal empirical object of poverty research. This myopic focus hinders the creation of a comprehensive and relational approach to the cultural study of poverty and inequality. Ultimately, this article provides grounds to rethink the ontological foundations of contemporary poverty knowledge, and presents, more broadly, a reflexive cultural approach that can be profitably applied to other fields of scholarship.