Victoria Lawson

This collection of essays extends cross‐disciplinary conversations between co‐authors that began as part of a podcast series by the Relational Poverty Network, “New Poverty Politics for Changing Times”. The authors engage impoverishment as a relation, as an outcome of intersecting political projects of racialised oppression, political‐economic injustice and socio‐legal control. Across various sites, the collection’s essays trace poverty politics, providing conjunctural and multi‐scalar analyses that illuminate the operations of power in producing impoverishment. They direct our attention beyond topics typically associated with poverty studies, showing how processes such as bordering, migrant illegality, racial capitalism and caring community politics intersect in poverty politics today. Our introductory essay argues for a relational poverty analysis that addresses the entanglements of cultural politics, those that produce classificatory schemes, together with political‐economic processes that produce various forms of poverty politics in the current conjuncture. We chart thinkable and unthinkable poverty politics across the collection’s essays in order to analyse current hegemonic formations of poverty governance as well as alternative imaginations and actions that are resisting and reworking relations of impoverishment. Ultimately, this collection expands vocabularies and analytical repertoires for understanding the ongoing ways in which impoverishment is produced and resisted, positing relationality as key to re‐politicising poverty towards a more just future.

Peter Marcuse’s (1988) “Neutralizing Homelessness” was written at a moment of unprecedented homelessness in the United States and rising homeless activism and advocacy. The paper issued a radical c...

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.

We trace how the category of care comes to be constituted historically and in social theory in ways that privilege the autonomous individual as economic agent and, in the process, renders care a problematic residual to social order and social theory. We investigate how theoretical categories, social relations, institutional orders and discursive practices separate care and economy in ways that constitute those in need (including the impoverished) as less valuable, subordinate and a drain on society. We then highlight a global trend towards the commodification of care within market logics of choice, even as the particular expression of these processes is worked out in and through the histories and cultures of places. We further argue that this repositioning of care within market relations of exchange obscures the fundamental interrelatedness of all humans and obscures the possibility of thinking more inclusive and less hierarchical forms of sociality.