Critical Global Poverty Studies

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Critical Global Poverty Studies

• Asun Lera St.Clair, UIB

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Why Critical Global Poverty Studies

• Defining, measuring and proposing policies for
  poverty in the south is dominated by the
  knowledge and politics of global development
  agencies, the politics of donors and global
  policy ideas
• The most important producer of knowledge about
  poverty is the World Bank.
• Ignores many alternatives, ignores poverty in
  advanced economies and the lessons and cross over
  of concepts and ideas that occurs in practice
  between the north and the south.
• Ignores the relations between poverty and
  wellbeing, quality of life and inequalities.
• Ignores that severe poverty is one of the biggest
  injustices of our generation

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The key concepts are Global and Moral the
key goal Alternative Poverty Knowledge

• Global Poverty is an under-researched idea with
  possibilities for producing knowledge that points
  to courses of action very different than standard
  poverty research .
• The main partner, UIB and UW- are home to
  alternative research related to the global
  understanding of poverty issues
• From Scandinavian understandings on welfare
  research, social policy, gender and care research
  to a strong engagement on development related
  research and other global challenges, ethics and
  poverty, UIB has much to offer in the rethinking
  of poverty.
• UW is an excellent cross over, home to excellence
  in US academia. Most important it links with
  current state of the art research on poverty in
  America.

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WUN Universities are home to Poverty Research and
alternative views on related global issues
http//www.wun.ac.uk/demo/globalpoverty/index.html
As a Network of universities it may offer a
stronger and more legitimate platform for engaged
dialogue with key actors than individual scholars
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Principles Drafted in Seattle

• We begin from the idea that poverty as a global
  phenomenon, occurring in all parts of the globe
  (both Majority and Minority Worlds). What new
  research questions arise once poverty is seen as
  global? We take poverty to be relational,
  produced at once through social relations, and
  also understood in particular places in relation
  to wealth and privilege.
• We address the limitations of purely market-based
  approaches to poverty reduction This includes
  critiques of the extension of market relations
  into almost everything, and the implications of
  neo-liberal roll backs in institutional
  involvements (at various scales with different
  profiles in different places) in poverty
  reduction.

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Principles cont.

• We examine the importance of considering the
  cultural politics of poverty how cultural
  productions and discursive formations come to
  frame people and places as 'poor'? How do these
  cultural productions work to reproduce poverty
  through processes of exclusion, exception and
  arguments for the remaking of people and places?
  We also consider the co-production of poverty,
  attending to how people accommodate poverty,
  seeking to maintain dignity and civility rather
  than resisting either representations or material
  productions of poverty/inequality.

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Principles cont.

• We approach global poverty from an ethical
  perspective and as a question of justice -- not
  of charity. Various perspectives are needed
  here
• Insights from development ethics and global
  justice
• Insights from critical feminist ethic of care
  questions of ethics and morality, including the
  necessity to engage fully with participants from
  other places who may define the issues quite
  differently.
• Research that raises moral awareness for global
  poverty and that is policy and action oriented.

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Principles cont.

• What are the methodological challenges for
  understanding poverty in the ways detailed above?
  We embrace notions of praxis and aspire to
  speaking to political and policy debates.
• We also consider how people interpret and
  challenge both the category of poverty and
  processes producing impoverishment. We consider
  how people on the ground co-produce, contest,
  negotiate these poverty processes and discursive
  formations. We attend to their analyses of
  poverty processes and learn through their
  organized responses in the everyday.

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Principles cont.

• Tentacular approaches to poverty that explode
  boundaries between North and South, a networked
  ontology for critical poverty studies that
  embraces global dimensions.
• We are committed to an inter-disciplinary framing
  of these issues. The team is formed with
  participants from the following disciplines
  philosophy, anthropology, geography, political
  science, sociology, global social policy,
  economics, and urban planning.

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Principles cont.

• We share a common conceptual orientation a
  social constructionist political-economy approach
  to understanding poverty. An approach which
  views poverty as being produced through
  political, economic, and cultural mechanisms,
  that are connected and recurrent across space and
  also (co)produced through human actions and
  places. We argue for the simultaneity of the
  operation of materials processes and social
  constructions of poverty. We have a central
  concern with social and global justice and we
  view the poor as creative agents with capacity to
  define their actions and futures. Our work has
  clear ethical dimensions that are concerned with
  global and social justice.

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Principles cont.

• Our group will engage with a range of
  methodologies to understanding critical poverty
  studies. We will employ critical ethnography,
  global ethnography, grounded, qualitative field
  work and quantitative analyses.
• We bring these approaches into conversation in
  order to think about new measures, new
  mechanisms, that can be explored quantitatively
  and that can enter into policy debates.
• We aim to interlink and engage in the current
  debate of global social policy

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Bergen University Fund Grant 2007

• We have received a grant from the Bergen
  University fund to bring an extended group of WUN
  scholars to Bergen 31 October-2 November 2007
• We aim to produce a paper to be published in a
  major international journal
• We aim to produce pedagogical tools
• Our goal may be the creation of a WUN Summer
  Institute on Critical Global Poverty Studies
  rotating among all the WUN partners.
• An ambitious yet feasible goal is the creation of
  Journal on Critical Global Poverty Studies
  (Routledge or Sage e.g.,) (there is none in the
  market right now)!

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Participants Bergen Meeting

• Vicky Lawson, UW (USA). Professor, Geography.
• Lucy Jarosz UW (USA), Associate Professor,
  Geography.
• Craig Jeffrey UW (USA), Associate Professor,
  Geography.
• Leif Jensen, Penn State (USA) Professor,
  Economics and Demography.
• David Wilson, Urbana Illinois (USA), Professor,
  Geography.
• Sam Hickey, Manchester (UK), Lecturer, Political
  Science.
• Maia Green, Manchester (UK), Professor,
  Anthropology.

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Participants Bergen Meeting cont.

• Bob Deacon, Sheffield (UK), Professor of
  International Social Policy, Sociology.
• Shana Cohen, Sheffield (UK), Senior Research
  Fellow in Social Policy and Social Care.
• Lisa Fuller (Sheffield and Toronto) Post doc
  fellow, Philosophy.
• Hongyang Wang, Nanjing University (China),
  Professor, Urban Development.
• Dan Banik, U Oslo (Norway) SUM, Associate
  Professor, Political Science.

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Participants Bergen Meeting cont.

• Vigdis Broch-Due, UIB (Norway), Professor,
  Anthropology
• John McNeish, UIB-CMI (Norway) Senior Researcher,
  Anthropology
• Ranghild Overa, UIB (Norway), Associate
  Professor, Geography
• Kari Wærness, UIB (Norway), Professor, Sociology
• Olav Korsnes, UIB (Norway) Professor, Sociology.
• Asun Lera St. Clair UIB (Norway), Associate
  Professor, Philosophy and Sociology

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Pending confirmation and Invited but unable to
come (part of the group)

• Nana Kildar, UIB (Norway) Rokkan Centre,
  Scandinavian Welfare Research, Political Science
• Barbara Reskin, UW (USA), Professor, Sociology
• Desmond McNeill, UIO (Norway), Director and
  Research Professor, Political Economy (depending
  on final dates-In Oxford all fall semester)
• Not Able to Come
• Jamie Peck, Madison Wisconsin, (USA)
• Leif Wenar Sheffield University, Professor,
  Philosophy.
• Sarah Goering, UW (USA), Philosophy.

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Global Development ChallengesThe Bergen Summer
Research School

• www.gdc.uib.no
• 2008 dedicated to poverty
• We envision future editions of the Bergen Summer
  Research School dedicated to global development
  challenges with international and national
  relevance where Bergen is home to leading
  research.
• E.g., Global Environmental Change
• E.g., Global Health
• E.g., Norms, Values, Language and Culture
• We envision the emergence of core research
  groups working towards new innovative research
  with relevance for advanced as well as
  developing, and less developed economies.
• We see WUN as a key partner
• Critical Global Poverty Studies course
  (Bergen-based)

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Ready to make connections with other themes

• My own work on poverty relates to climate change.
  Comparing scientific discourses and
  politicization a economization of both global
  challenges.
• Currently working on Human Security as a holistic
  global normative discourse linking global poverty
  and climate change
• Example

ESF Exploratory Workshop on Shifting the
Discourse Climate Change as an Issue of Human
Security Oslo, Norway, 21 - 24 June 2007