Poverty Regulation And Social Justice

"By 2004, Ontario and British Columbia implemented "safe streets" legislation, laws that criminalize the economic activities, such as panhandling and squeegeeing, of people living in poverty. Concerned that Nova Scotia would do the same, the editors of this volume partnered with community groups to organize a public colloquium on the criminalization of poverty. Contributors to the colloquium from across Canada included a diversity of voices, from academics, policy makers and frontline workers to those affected first hand by these policies. This book, emerging from that conference, critically interrogates how state and private practices have increasingly come to over-regulate people with severely limited economic resources, and argues that the criminalization of our society's most vulnerable, the poor, women, the racialized, the disabled, youth, is materially and symbolically central to neoliberal politics and economics. The essays here also point to new ways of moving forward, approaches to poverty that minimize the use of law and regulation and have the potential to create a more compassionate future"--Back cover.

Emerging from a public colloquium on the criminalization of poverty, this volume critically interrogates how state and private practices have increasingly come to over-regulate people with severely limited economic resources, and understands this regulation as part of the dynamics of liberal capitalism. Exploring issues such as homelessness, social assistance and single mothers, and written from a diversity of perspectives from academics to frontline workers, policy-makers and those affected first hand by these practices, this book aims to help readers imagine a more compassionate future.

"By 2004, Ontario and British Columbia implemented "safe streets" legislation, laws that criminalize the economic activities, such as panhandling and squeegeeing, of people living in poverty. Concerned that Nova Scotia would do the same, the editors of this volume partnered with community groups to organize a public colloquium on the criminalization of poverty. Contributors to the colloquium from across Canada included a diversity of voices, from academics, policy makers and frontline workers to those affected first hand by these policies. This book, emerging from that conference, critically interrogates how state and private practices have increasingly come to over-regulate people with severely limited economic resources, and argues that the criminalization of our society's most vulnerable, the poor, women, the racialized, the disabled, youth, is materially and symbolically central to neoliberal politics and economics. The essays here also point to new ways of moving forward, approaches to poverty that minimize the use of law and regulation and have the potential to create a more compassionate future"--Back cover.

Winner of the International Studies in Poverty Prize awarded by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and Zed Books. Poverty has become the central focus of global development efforts, with a vast body of research and funding dedicated to its alleviation. And yet, the field of poverty studies remains deeply ideological and has been used to justify wealth and power within the prevailing world order. Andrew Martin Fischer clarifies this deeply political character, from conceptions and measures of poverty through to their application as policies. Poverty as Ideology shows how our dominant approaches to poverty studies have, in fact, served to reinforce the prevailing neoliberal ideology while neglecting the wider interests of social justice that are fundamental to creating more equitable societies. Instead, our development policies have created a 'poverty industry' that obscures the dynamic reproductions of poverty within contemporary capitalist development and promotes segregation in the name of science and charity. Fischer argues that an effective and lasting solution to global poverty requires us to reorient our efforts away from current fixations on productivity and towards more equitable distributions of wealth and resources. This provocative work offers a radical new approach to understanding poverty based on a comprehensive and accessible critique of key concepts and research methods. It upends much of the received wisdom to provide an invaluable resource for students, teachers and researchers across the social sciences.

Nonfiction. A thorough and comprehensive analysis of poverty in the United States and abroad by renowned social scientists, statesman, humanists, and theologians.

The International Forum for Social Development was a 3 year project undertaken by the United Nations. Department of Economic and Social Affairs between 2001 and 2004 to promote international cooperation for social development and supporting developing countries and social groups not benefiting from the globalization process. This publication provides an overview and interpretation of the discussions and debates that occurred at the four meetings of the Forum for Social Development held at the United Nations headquarters in New York, within the framework of the implementation of the outcome of the World Summit for Social Development.

Territories of Poverty challenges the conventional North-South geographies through which poverty scholarship is organized. Staging theoretical interventions that traverse social histories of the American welfare state and critical ethnographies of international development regimes, these essays confront how poverty is constituted as a problem. In the process, the book analyzes bureaucracies of poverty, poor people’s movements, and global networks of poverty expertise, as well as more intimate modes of poverty action such as volunteerism. From post-Katrina New Orleans to Korean church missions in Africa, this book is fundamentally concerned with how poverty is territorialized. In contrast to studies concerned with locations of poverty, Territories of Poverty engages with spatial technologies of power, be they community development and counterinsurgency during the American 1960s or the unceasing anticipation of war in Beirut. Within this territorial matrix, contributors uncover dissent, rupture, and mobilization. This book helps us understand the regulation of poverty—whether by globally circulating models of fast policy or vast webs of mobile money or philanthrocapitalist foundations—as multiple terrains of struggle for justice and social transformation.