Politics Of Poverty Research Articles

The Politics of Poverty in Contemporary Russia

The Politics of Poverty in Contemporary Russia, by Ann-Mari Sätre, is reviewed by Kirsti Stuvøy, Associate Professor, Faculty of Landscape and Society, International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU).

Poor Representation: Congress and the Politics of Poverty in the United States

Poor Representation: Congress and the Politics of Poverty in the United States

The Symbolic Politics of Poverty in the United States: A Review Essay

The Symbolic Politics of Poverty in the United States: A Review Essay

Poor Representation: Congress and the Politics of Poverty in the United States. By Kristina C. Miler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 234p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper.

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Race and poverty matters: Black and Latino linked fate, neighborhood effects, and political participation

ABSTRACTWe examine if and how race and contextual poverty, among other neighborhood effects, impact Black and Latino/a rates of political participation. To do so, we expand upon questions at the intersection of Cohen and Dawson’s [1993. “Neighborhood Poverty and African American Politics.” The American Political Science Review 87: 286–302.] highly-cited study of neighborhood poverty’s impact upon African American political participation and Dawson’s [1994. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.] seminal study of Black linked fate. Our analysis of Black and Latino/a subsamples of the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Study (CMPS) data yields three principle findings. First, somewhat contrary to Cohen and Dawson [1993. “Neighborhood Poverty and African American Politics.” The American Political Science Review 87: 286–302.], we find contextual poverty has no statistically significant effect upon African American political participation; however, we find it significantly and negatively effects Latino/a political participation. This may speak to how contemporary forms of economic segregation impact Latino/a communities. Second, we find linked fate has positive and statistically significant effects upon Black and Latino/a political participation, which reinforces Dawson’s [1994. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.] previous findings. And third, beyond the scope of the aforementioned works, we find that face-to-face neighbor interactions positively and significantly promote Black and Latino/a political participation. In conclusion, we discuss how, despite changing political and economic contexts, Dawson’s work remains relevant for understanding Black (and Latino/a) political participation.

Repoliticizing poverty: A symposium on Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood’s Relational Poverty Politics: Forms, Struggles, and Possibilities

Repoliticizing poverty: A symposium on Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood’s <i>Relational Poverty Politics: Forms, Struggles, and Possibilities</i>

The Politics of Poverty

The reduction in the official poverty rate seen in relation with increasing morbidity status, a mammoth income gap between the rich and the poor, ambiguous methodology followed to calculate Below Poverty Line Census and government policies on poverty reduction tends to question the whole poverty line debate. The official commitment to higher economic growth may reflect booming economic growth but it also has led to a large gap between the rich and the poor in both regional and social dimensions. To look into the causes and ameliorate poverty levels, various committees and policies have identified poverty levels. Using different criteria and methods, they still have failed to look at the social and political aspects. It is politics that has engulfed the whole discourse over universalisation of social welfare policies as some sort of justification behind the nation’s fiscal deficit and subsidy constraint-related questions.

Social Construction, Knowledge Utilization, and the Politics of Poverty: A Case Study of Washington State’s General Assistance Reform

Author(s): Chang, YL | Abstract: This paper addresses a gap in welfare reform literature by investigating the social constructions of poor people in state policymaking within the context of diminishing General Assistance (GA) after the Great Recession. Using social construction and policy design theory and thematic content analysis of Washington State’s legislative archives, I found that the negative constructions of GA recipients as deviants with undesired psychological and behavioral problems were associated with the reform direction toward a regulated, punitive model. These constructions, intersecting with the ideologies of personal responsibility and work ethic, contribute to the dismantling of the social safety net for Washington’s poorest residents.

From the Local to the Colonial: Toynbee Hall and the Politics of Poverty

From the Local to the Colonial: Toynbee Hall and the Politics of Poverty

La política de la pobreza y el gobierno de los asentamientos informales en Chile

Informal settlements in Chile are understood as territorial concentrations of poverty. This understanding has shaped housing policy for informal settlements. However, despite the fact that poverty rates have reduced considerably in the country, informal settlements have not reduced as expected. Building upon Foucault’s framework of governmentality, I examine the framing of poverty that has become taken-for-granted today. Through the examination of official state documents and presidential discourses, I trace the concepts used to describe informal settlements between the 1940s and the 1990s. The concept of poverty gains predominance during the military dictatorship (1973-1989) and consolidates as a framing to understand informal settlements only starting from the 1990s. This framing, that I refer to as “the politics of poverty” became instrumental to transform informal settlements into a governable population, from collective and political actions aimed to negotiate access to housing, to individual and de-politicized actions seeking government assistance. The implications of this transformation are discussed.

Capital and conscience: poverty management and the financialization of good intentions in the San Francisco Bay Area

ABSTRACT Social impact investing differentiates itself from traditional investing by claiming to create public social benefits alongside private profits. Globally, municipal governments are increasingly looking to this model to fund urban social services and poverty management. Through a case study of social impact investing in affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, I deconstruct the financial and ideological underpinnings of this model to understand how private profits are drawn from local geographies of impoverishment. Analyzing social impact investing as a poverty politics reveals how it places preexisting, state-subsidized systems of poverty management into social impact investing portfolios, dividing impoverished spaces into new hierarchies of deservingness by incorporating private investors’ visions of what will help low-income tenants. But these processes also fail to subsume social life within housing financed in this manner, as tenant practices subverting those idealized by the state and investors persist alongside the generation of private profits.

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.

‘My Dog is My Home’: multispecies care and poverty politics in Los Angeles, California and Austin, Texas

My Dog is My Home is an art activist project in Los Angeles dedicated to sharing testimonies about the redemptive bonds of care and love between homeless persons and their canine companions. These testimonies politicize the structural violence and oppressive norms about propertied citizenship and notions of home that operate to render homeless human and animal lives disposable and ungrievable. Informed by the experts’ testimonies on multispecies homelessness and an engagement with feminist care theory, we bring relational poverty studies into conversation with critical animal studies to reject this framing of homeless lives as disposable and to trouble the idea of property as the fundamental basis for value. We problematize these notions by highlighting the insights gained from witnessing the entangled empathetic relationships forged between homeless humans and dogs. These relationships are not only a window into the political economic material conditions and discourses that reproduce homelessness and the animal-as-property. We conclude that studying these bonds offers a collective politics of multispecies mutuality, care, and love.

Poverty Politics and Governance of Potable Water Services: the Core–Periphery Syntax in Metropolitan Accra, Ghana

In developing countries, increasing urbanization amidst chronic financial constraints sharply limits the authorities’ ability to provide universal urban infrastructural services. This tendency creates complex networks of governance that remains largely understudied and not clearly understood. This article examines this nascent literature, focusing on Metropolitan Accra’s experience through the sustainable development goal lens: “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”. Based on the analysis of 26 in-depth interviews with key informants about the current processes, technologies and multiplicities of governance approaches, we demonstrate how the private sector does not only play a significant role in shaping the water dialogue but also has introduced its own modes of governance, which sometimes usurps preferences for public services. Ultimately, differences in procedural legalities and functionalities have spurred (un)healthy competition between the multiple governance modes, spearheaded by the private firms. Concluding, we caution that the multiplicity of management practices devoid of efficient and effective regulatory framework creates indecisive outcomes. Further, we suggest that the development of water-related capacity, both at the individual and institutional levels, will be fundamental in the realization of sustainable development goal 6 by 2030.

Politics of Poverty: The Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals and the Business of Agriculture

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) are an important framework that sets the development agenda for the next 15 years. Through targets and means of implementation, the SDGs appear to speak to development challenges in a comprehensive way; however, they are highly problematic. This is apparent in their conception and understanding of sustainability, especially in relation to agriculture and its role in poverty reduction and development. By focusing on the agricultural component of the SDGs, I demonstrate how the interests of agribusiness are explicitly aligned and advanced through a problematic conception of sustainability that underpins the SDGs. I suggest the ‘agriculture for development’ agenda that is present in the SDGs is really about ensuring the interests of agribusiness at the expense of ensuring actual sustainable development. I conclude that the social and political efforts coming from such an alignment undermine efforts to advance actual sustainability and substantive ecological relations.

Money, Morality, and Masculinity: Staging the Politics of Poverty in Sanskrit Theater

Explored here is a series of rhetorico-narrative linkages in the Sanskrit play Mṛcchakaṭika (“The Little Clay Cart”), a set of associations between terms such as wealth, poverty, virtue, and crime. These connections add up to a governing sociopolitical concept, allowing us to extrapolate from the world of the Mṛcchakaṭika ’s concepts to its concepts of its world.

Politics of Poverty in Odisha

This paper situates poverty in the socio-economic and political history of Odisha that explains increasing landlessness as a major underlying cause. While the class character of the State privileges the neoliberal policies, which prevents its intervention in the redistribution of basic productive resources that can alter power relations, it has consciously contributed to the strengthening of the processes of systemic deprivation and impoverishment of certain sections of society. The Kalahandi study becomes relevant in the context of the dominant poverty discourse which undermines the root causes of poverty.

“For Us It Is Otherwise”

In this paper I seek to attend to the paradox of Palestinian refugee poverty in Lebanon, a poverty engineered and deliberately perpetuated through the play of recent state sovereignties, and incorporated in the material and bodily lifeworlds of a majority of Lebanon’s Palestinians. This poverty is not effectuated in the recognizable form of a “political subject of poverty”—a “I, poor”—who would emerge in the interpretative act of establishing a semiotic relationship of some kind between her malnourishment, ill health, or exposure to dampness and dust on the one hand and on the other a field of social belonging in which she would claim inclusion. In order to do so, through three brief ethnographic sketches I draw attention to processes of disclosure of self and world strung together from the everyday run-ins with the world that the lives of the refugee poor entail. If there is a politics of refugee poverty, I argue, its distinctiveness lies in shunning the category of citizenship and the manner in which th...

Unpacking the spaces and politics of energy poverty: path-dependencies, deprivation and fuel switching in post-communist Hungary

This paper focuses on the embeddedness of energy poverty – understood as the inability to secure a socially and materially necessitated level of energy services in the home – in the socio-technical legacies inherited from past development trajectories, as well as broader economic and institutional landscapes. Using Hungary as an example, we explore the recent expansion of energy poverty across different demographic and income groups. While much of the mainstream literature focuses on cases where energy poverty affects distinct social groups and issues, our analyses examine the systemic implications of a form of deprivation that involves a much wider range of social and spatial strata. We develop a framework that highlights the different ways in which inadequate access to energy services has resulted in the emergence of new political reconfigurations among a variety of actors, while prompting the articulation of household strategies with far-reaching structural consequences.

“The poor are us”: middle-class poverty politics in Buenos Aires and Seattle

We investigate middle-class poverty politics in Seattle and Buenos Aires in a period of recovery from deep neoliberal economic crisis. Reading these cases in relation to one another allows us to examine what sorts of class subjects emerge in the US, which is theorized as remaining deeply entrenched in neoliberal governance and Argentina, conceptualized as postneoliberal. We investigate the poverty politics of middle-class residents engaged in anti- or pro-poor activism against homeless encampments or squatter settlements in urban neighborhoods. Rooted in relational poverty theory, we conceptualize these forms of activism as relational practices through which class subjectivities are reiterated or challenged through interactions across class lines. Specifically, we examine (i) how middle-class actors frame their differences or alliances with poorer residents and (ii) how these framings of middle-class selves and poorer others are expressed in poverty politics and cross-class antagonisms or alliances. Our analysis reveals poverty as a key site for the making of middle-class actors as individualized, aspirational, normative subjects in both countries. And yet the poverty politics of middle-class actors is not a foregone conclusion because cross-class alliances do arise, pointing toward the potential for alternative readings of class difference.