Poor Representation

The poor are grossly underrepresented in Congress both overall and by individual legislators, even those who represent high-poverty districts.

Explains cross-national differences in the political and partisan representation of low-income voters, focusing attention on the electoral geography of income.

Understanding the many complexities that define gender inequality has been described by researchers as a grand challenge. Novel insights, innovation, a broader community to conduct research and to ascertain effective interventions are essential in the challenge to create organizations that are gender equal. As such, this Research Topic in Frontiers in Psychology addresses the under-representation of women in engineering and computing as a complex, but solvable problem. This Research Topic seeks to inform the global community about advances in understanding the under-representation of women in engineering and computing with a focus on what enables change. Further, this Topic will promote fresh perspectives, innovative methodologies, and mixed method approaches important to accelerating the pace of change.

6 Party Government and Responsiveness: James A. Stimson

During the 1980s the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. In 1981 alone, 70 percent of the $35 billion cut from the federal budget came from programs for the poor. Although the disparity in incomes has been widely reported, the efforts of antipoverty activists and groups combating the Reagan/Bush agenda have largely been overlooked. Poverty and Power follows the rise, decline, and partial resurgence of poor Americans’ representation from the War on Poverty to the Reagan Revolution. Drawing on personal interviews and financial reports, Douglas R. Imig examines the political activity and organizational crises of antipoverty groups including the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law, the Food Research and Action Center, the Community Nutrition Institute, Bread for the World, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Children’s Defense Fund. His findings delineate how electoral policy and economic change in the 1980s posed a direct threat to the welfare of the poor, and suggest reasons why no massive mobilization for social justice emerged. Still, the dogged efforts of advocates and activists culminated in the passage of the 1987 McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, the first positive federal intervention into domestic social policy since the Reagan inauguration. Imig helps us understand the complex relationships between opportunity and action that characterize all social movements.

Through the efforts of increasingly media-aware NGOs, people in the west are bombarded with images of poverty and inequality in the developing world. Representations of Poverty is the first comprehensive study of the communications and imagery used by international NGOs to represent the developing world. In this meticulously researched and original book, Nandita Dogra examines the full cycle of representation - integrating analyses of the public messages of international development NGOs in the UK with the views of their staff and audiences. Exploring the Europeanised discourses inherent in appeals to this notion of a 'common humanity', she argues for a greater acknowledgment of NGOs as significant mediating institutions which can expand understandings of global inequalities and their historical causation. The book is a timely addition to the growing fields of development and media studies and will be a key resource for academics, policymakers and practitioners alike who have an interest in global poverty, aid, NGOs, and the politics of representation.

In Art and Representation, John Willats presents a radically new theory of pictures. To do this, he has developed a precise vocabulary for describing the representational systems in pictures: the ways in which artists, engineers, photographers, mapmakers, and children represent objects. His approach is derived from recent research in visual perception and artificial intelligence, and Willats begins by clarifying the key distinction between the marks in a picture and the features of the scene that these marks represent. The methods he uses are thus closer to those of a modern structural linguist or psycholinguist than to those of an art historian. Using over 150 illustrations, Willats analyzes the representational systems in pictures by artists from a wide variety of periods and cultures. He then relates these systems to the mental processes of picture production, and, displaying an impressive grasp of more than one scholarly discipline, shows how the Greek vase painters, Chinese painters, Giotto, icon painters, Picasso, Paul Klee, and David Hockney have put these systems to work. But this book is not only about what systems artists use but also about why artists from different periods and cultures have used such different systems, and why drawings by young children look so different from those by adults. Willats argues that the representational systems can serve many different functions beyond that of merely providing a convincing illusion. These include the use of anomalous pictorial devices such as inverted perspective, which may be used for expressive reasons or to distance the viewer from the depicted scene by drawing attention to the picture as a painted surface. Willats concludes that art historical changes, and the developmental changes in children's drawings, are not merely arbitrary, nor are they driven by evolutionary forces. Rather, they are determined by the different functions that the representational systems in pictures can serve. Like readers of Ernst Gombrich's famous Art and Illusion (still available from Princeton University Press), on which Art and Representation makes important theoretical advances, or Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception, Willats's readers will find that they will never again return to their old ways of looking at pictures.

Even with increased attention to refugee women’s issues in the late 20th century, post-colonial discourses have nurtured limiting representations of refugee women, predominantly as subjects of charity and as victims. Adding to a growing body of work in the field, the author challenges this preconception by offering an opportunity for women’s voices to shape and influence policy, especially as it pertains to the role of education in the authoring of their own lives. In this volume, Melinda McPherson centres refugee women’s voices in the educational policy debate. Drawing on interviews with a group of refugee women in Melbourne, she explores purposes of education, and asks what kind of society these women imagine for themselves and for others. Their critical reflections, personal experiences and diverse backgrounds offer a contrasting picture to that privileged in ordinary policy debate. The women require support, resources, and guidance; but they are agents in their own lives who bring strength, thought, and imagination to crafting their own destinies in a new country. Education is a pivotal tool in exercising that agency. Throughout the book, discussions centre on why education matters to refugee women, focusing upon the integral links between education, civil society, and successful settlement, and conversely on the negative impacts of exclusionary practices. Representation and participation in education is a topic of critical social justice concern, and as such, the book will form important reading for academics, students, policy makers, and community development researchers.