Poverty

Key Concepts (Polity)

by Ruth Lister

Poverty remains one of the most urgent issues of our time. In this stimulating new textbook, Ruth Lister introduces students to the meaning and experience of poverty in the contemporary world.
The book opens with a lucid discussion of current debates around the definition and measurement of poverty in industrialized societies, before embarking on a thought-provoking and multi-faceted exploration of its conceptualization. It draws on thinking in the field of international development and real life accounts to emphasize aspects of poverty such as powerlessness, lack of voice, loss of dignity and respect.
In so doing, the book embraces the relational, cultural, symbolic as well as material dimensions of poverty and makes important links between poverty and other concepts like well-being, capabilities, social divisions and exclusion, agency and citizenship. It concludes by making the case for reframing the politics of poverty as a claim for redistribution and recognition. The result is a rich and insightful analysis, which deepens and broadens our understanding of poverty today.

This book will be essential reading for all students in the social sciences, as well as researchers, activists and policy-makers.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published December 15, 2004

Reviews

[Elizabeth Higginbotham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive book on poverty, that addresses the state of international discourse, that looks at both the North and South, but greater attention to the UK and EU, as the author is British. She has a conceptual model of how we have to consider economic inequality as different from other sources of stratification, but also consider how all the dimensions of inequality work together in the vision and treatment offered to people.

The book begins with detail discussions of definitions and measurements, covering the historical development, North and South divisions, as well as differences within nations and regions. We can see how views have changed historically and consider what is appropriate for our time. This provide background for other chapters that discuss how poverty connects with gender and race, often making the lived reality invisible. The way that practices of “othering” contribute to both stigma and shame and silencing the voice of the poor. Lister is very careful in the use of language, as powerful agents are often doing the defining of who is poor and why. Recognizing the human agency of people with few economic resources is important. That is a step necessary in involving them as equals at the table for discussion of policies and politics. The book, while primarily of interest to policy makers, planners, and researchers, has much to say to a wider audience because we all have to rethink poverty in this age of much inequality.

[Miebaka Inyeinengi]

I am a broadcaster and developmental communications professional, I comment publicly on developmental matters arising in my world therefore search for knowledge for FREE. I earnestly want to read your book to enlighten my community towards solutions in that regard, but no free pdf download is available.
Kindly consider a free copy to my mail on COMMUNITY SERVICE and PR ( miebakaoctober291970@gmail.com)
Most grateful, best wishes Ruth Lister.