Deep Poverty

The Politics of Inequality - Lecture 1

Lecturer: Dr Daniel Edmiston

27 July 2022

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Lectures:

1. Deep Poverty

2. Exploring the Growth of Charitable Food Aid in the UK

3. The UK’s Global Economic Elite

Since the 2007-08 global financial crisis, empirical sociology has made great headway to better understand economic elites and their bearing on social fragmentation. By contrast, much less concerted, co-ordinated attention has been given to extreme marginality in the lowest range of the socio-economic order across late capitalist contexts.

In part, this stems from a (misplaced) belief that the incidence of destitution is reserved for ‘other’ people and places outside of Europe and North America.

In this session, we will interrogate this idea by exploring an increasing depth of poverty in the UK. Learning lessons from past attempts to map categories of (class) disadvantage, we will reflect on the need to ensure all social groups are legible in poverty analysis if we are to fully understand deepening inequalities globally.

Reading

  • Ahmed, N. et al. (2022) Inequality Kills: The unparalleled action needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID-19. Oxfam: Oxford.
  • Booth, C. (ed.) (1889). Labour and Life of the People. (Vol. 1). Williams and Norgate: London.
  • Edin, K. & Shaefer, L. (2016) $2.00 a day: Living on almost nothing in America. Boston: Mariner Books.
  • Edmiston, D. (2022) Plumbing the Depths: The Changing (Socio-Demographic) Profile of UK Poverty, Journal of Social Policy, 51(2): 385-411.
  • Lee, T. (2020) Dragged Deeper: How families are falling further and further below the poverty line, London: Child Poverty Action Group.
  • Gaibauer, H., Schweiger, G., Sedmark, C. (2019) Absolute Poverty in Europe: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Hidden Phenomenon. Bristol: Policy Press.
  • Savage, M. (2021) The Return of Inequality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Sen, A. (1983) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Tyler, I. (2020) Stigma: The machinery of inequality, London: Zed Books.
  • Varner, C., Mattingly, M. & Grusky, D. (2017) The Facts Behind the Visions, Pathways, Spring: 3-8.
  • World Bank (2017) Monitoring global poverty: Report of the commission on global poverty, Washington: World Bank.

Resources

Questions for Discussion

  1. Which definitions and measures of poverty do you find most convincing and why?
  2. What lessons do past approaches to poverty analysis (e.g. Booth) offer to those interested in better capturing and responding to (deep) poverty?
  3. Why are some social groups more visible than others in poverty analysis?

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