Critical Global Poverty
The Critical Global Poverty initiative is exploring a series of questions that might frame innovative approaches to understanding and acting on poverty in a global frame. The premise is that poverty is 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’?
- Poverty to be relational, produced at once through social relations, and also understood in particular places in relation to wealth and privilege.
- 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?
- 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.
"Poverty isn't just about the poor" - information sheet about this group (PDF 383kb)
Climate Change and Poverty
Additionally, the Critical Global Poverty initiative aims to design a collaborative research plan for investigating climate change discourse in relation to the poor. A key feature is to include voices both from the majority and the minority worlds in the project, and to integrate earth system science, social sciences and the humanities. Climate change is one of the most crucial challenges for our generation.
The project aims to find answers to the following overarching question: how do climate change discourse of various actors, globally and locally, relate to the also pressing challenge of global poverty?
We ask how climate narratives affect approaches to the poor and their rights, welfare achievements, and particularly rights related to resources affected by climate change impacts such as water, food and health.
Sub-group
Framing research on development impacts of climate narratives