Figments of the future: the irony of shelter and security on the Seattle streetscape

Nick Gottschall, University of Washington, Jackson School of International Studies 

I

You can see the gentrification of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood in the landscape of towering cranes. You can see the gentrification of Capitol Hill in half-demolished buildings, hastily-assembled chainlink fences, incessant drill rumblings, the endless immaculate conceptions of ostentatious plasticky condominiums.

You can see the gentrification of Capitol Hill in the shuttering of your favorite coffee shop, record store, sports bar (they’ve relocated to Ballard for now, but don’t worry, the sign assures you, they’ll be back in 2016 to reclaim the shiny condo complex’s ground floor retail spaces).

You can see the gentrification of Capitol Hill in the convergence of homeless bodies on the sidewalks, under awnings, staked out in doorways. The proliferation of construction sites lures a segment of Seattle’s transient population. Graffiti, drugs, sleeping bags—all the trappings of the conspicuous poor have appeared in the nooks and crannies, those unearthed shady spaces of condos-in-the-making.

Question: where do the poor people come from? Were they here all along? Have they literally come out of the woodwork, in an exposure facilitated by the destruction and reassembling of urban space? What can explain this intra-urban migration?

This is the irony of shelter, unfolded across space and time: today’s drug addict shooting up in tomorrow’s yuppie apartment; today’s battered wife taking refuge in tomorrow’s hipster coffee joint.

This is the relationality of poverty and privilege, writ large on the streetscape.

II

To levy criticism against the academic study of poverty is not difficult. The image of elitist professors and graduate students discussing the plight of “the poor” from the privileged and comfortable positions of university classrooms and tenured salaries is readily available to the public imagination. (And if it isn’t, maybe it should be.

Criticism runs both ways, and we “enlightened” academics despair of the uncritical claims of the “ignorant”:

Why are people poor?
They’re lazy.
They choose to be that way.
They make bad lifestyle choices.  

The rage provoked by hearing such declarations rivals only the intensity of the academic’s desire to prove them wrong, to concoct a clever response, to convert the ignorant from their misguided beliefs. The pull of elitism is a powerful one, and graduate students face a daily struggle: how do we harness “critical thinking” without invoking bombastic proclamations of dominant, insidious world-systems?

Why are people poor?
Neoliberal market fundamentalism.
White supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Institutionalized prison-industrial complexes.

Here we see a tension between “seeing too little” and “knowing too much.” The scholars writing as J.K. Gibson-Graham propose a tool to help bridge this gap: weak theory. Weak theory refuses to “know too much” about the world and guards against the burden of ceaselessly recalling conspiracy theory-esque dominant systems. My interpretation of weak theory entails a re-examination of the world around us by restoring the significance of our more “primitive senses” (of sight and sound, etc.) in place of the urge to plunge into grand theory and ambitious world-changing aspirations. In fact, according to Gibson-Graham, the humble acts of thought and speech enabled by weak theory resurrect a sort of hopefulness that can enact change in the world.

Importantly, weak theory can reveal the relationality of privilege and poverty—the idea that the former’s success produces and depends on the latter’s plight—in mundane urban life.

Below I sketch two thought exercises that demonstrate the application of weak theory to poverty and privilege in our daily lives.

III

In my last blog post I wrote about the University of Washington’s safety notification emails. Campus security sends these notifications to inform the university community of recent U-District criminal activity, most often muggings, petty theft and burglary. The regularity and predictability of these emails work to concretize boundaries between (insular) academics and the neighborhood’s (violent, conspicuous) poor. This is the routinization of threat.

The U-District is known for its population of innumerable homeless panhandlers, street youth, drug dealers and the like. Undeniably, many of these people own cell phones or have easy access to a computer and the internet. Without denigrating the abilities of campus security, it’s probably safe to say many crimes committed in the neighborhood go unreported—both to the police and to the campus community.

So what if we extend the safety notification apparatus to the neighborhood’s street community?

Imagine:

Sexual assault in a frat house? Homeless teens get a safety notification text. Drug deal in the dormitory? Panhandlers get an email. Rape? Rampant abuse of alcohol and Adderall? The list goes on.

You get the picture. The point of this exercise is merely to provoke a few questions. Whose safety matters? Whose interests are protected? Whose victimhood is validated?

This is the irony of security. The relationality of poverty and privilege is written into our laws, structured in our imaginations, and encountered in our everyday experience on the street and sidewalk.

Now to return to Capitol Hill. The transformation of the neighborhood by gentrification exposes—in a literal, visceral, visual sense—a segment of Seattle’s conspicuous, proximate poor. Surely the eight-story condominiums-in-the-making represent bastions of prosperity, emblems of the city’s resilience in the face of economic recession. Yet today, at this moment, these condos remain merely figments of the future. In their place—in the very same space—abide homeless bodies, poor bodies.

Weak theory demands that we see these juxtapositions. We need not invoke the refrains of uneven development, the criminalization of mental illness, the stigmatization of drug use or invalidation of non-normative family structures. (Although, in fact, we must absolutely keep talking about these.)

In these day-to-day experiences, weak theory asks only that we ascertain the ironies of shelter and security in our physical surroundings. Ascertain, that is, and keep asking questions.

IV

The ironies of urban living sketched here may arise from what Sheppard et al. characterize as the problems of mainstream global urbanism, or the notion that global development is on a trajectory toward city ideals of the advanced capitalist global North. The normative city dweller in mainstream global urbanism is the embodiment of the “personal responsibility” of welfare reform discourse. He (and he is emphatically a “he”) is the natural heir to the American protestant work ethic and “pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps” evangelism. The normative city dweller is an active participant in the market and seamlessly integrated in the financialized economy. He is above all a consumer.

Global mainstream urbanism epitomizes the ironies of shelter and security. According to Ananya Roy, the formalization of the housing market has meant that the “right to safe and sanitary shelter” enshrined in American citizenship actually prevents people from attaining any shelter at all. Laws intended to provide for the safety of homeless Americans actually work to displace them by criminalizing the informal occupation of space.

Here we return to “strong” theory: neoliberal market fundamentalism, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, hypocrisies of propertied citizenship in global mainstream urbanism. It is absolutely our duty to identify these forces, to name them, to call them out, to propose alternatives. But in so doing we should not underestimate our own primitive senses, our surroundings, our day-to-day confrontation with the relationality of poverty and privilege. Acknowledging irony, contradiction, juxtaposition—this is a key step toward accomplishing change.

The New One-Night House: Losing and Gaining Propertied Citizenship After the Foreclosure Crisis

Maggie Wilson, University of Washington, Department of Geography

“There is a belief around the world that if you can build a house between sunset and sunrise, then the owner of the land cannot expel you. There are many variations on this theme. The condition might be that the roof is in place, or that a pot is boiling on the fire, or that smoke can be seen emerging from the chimney. …The intriguingly widespread folklore of the one-night house seems to be an attempt to find a loophole in the stranglehold of land-ownership to create an opportunity to change a family’s destiny.”

–Colin Ward, Cotters and Squatters: Housing’s Hidden History (2002)

There is something alluringly American about the idea of the one-night house that anarchist writer Colin Ward describes in his history of British traditions of squatting. What, after all, could be more American than quickly translating an industrious work ethic into a single-family home, and all the social and financial security that it represents? But acquiring property in this way is also deeply subversive, as it offers an alternative to the transactional relationships that are central to capitalist practices of property ownership. It is not a purchase but a taking, an invasion rather than a negotiation.

For decades, home ownership has been many American families’ primary store of wealth. A house, so the conventional wisdom went, was more than shelter, but an investment that would inevitably increase in value over time. In fact, the online mortgage calculator provided by Freddie Mac itself (himself?) would only accept positive values for home appreciation rates—it assumed that it was only possible for home prices to increase.  This was a tool designed to help potential homebuyers determine whether or not buying a home was a sound financial decision. The prevailing assumption about home prices in America was quite literally encoded into the logic of the institutions, both public and private, at the core of the home financing system and the lending practices that they promoted and enacted.

In retrospect, of course, this thinking was toxically misguided. The very same logic about the American housing market that encouraged individuals to buy rather than rent was a strong incentive to mortgage lenders as well. Since residential property was assumed to be such a fundamentally sound investment, even if a borrower defaulted on a mortgage, the lender could theoretically resell the house to recoup its losses. And so it went, until the system was pushed past its breaking point.

We are all by now familiar with the wide-ranging and destructive effects of the collapse of the American housing market and subsequent financial crisis it unleashed. The epidemic of foreclosures that was one of its most proximate effects has contributed enormously to the further entrenchment of poverty and inequality in the United States all on its own. One of the most disheartening trends that it has contributed to is the widening of the wealth gap in America, and particularly the wealth gap among races. While the difference in average income for different racial groups remained more or less constant throughout the recession, the difference in average family wealth increased dramatically as nonwhite families lost their primary financial assets—their homes—in disproportionate numbers. As of 2010, the average white family was about six times as wealthy as the average nonwhite family. Many anti-poverty initiatives, like campaigns to raise the minimum wage, focus primarily on income, but in some ways, the wealth gap has a greater influence on the perpetuation and reinforcement of inequality.

But most houses are also homes, and a foreclosure is more than a financial loss for most families. Foreclosure features prominently in the narrative of “middle-class slippage” that Elwood and Lawson (2013) argue was foregrounded in the reframing of poverty during the recession. This narrative casts former members of the middle class as the central victims of the recession, and links the emergence of this new category of the poor to suburban places, while the urban and rural poor are largely ignored. The multiple meanings attached to owning a house in the suburbs—as an emblem of prosperity, a signifier of membership in the middle class, and a source of financial stability—were disrupted during the foreclosure crisis, and the images of half-finished suburban construction projects and abandoned, overgrown McMansions suggested an implosion of a key part of the American middle class itself.

Losing a home, becoming propertyless, amounts to a form of social displacement, a revocation of citizenship within the paradigm that Roy (2003) lays out. The paradigm of propertied citizenship interprets the rights relationship between subject and sovereign through property ownership. This was, of course, literally the case during the first few decades of American history; voting rights were contingent upon property ownership, and so the propertyless were by definition disenfranchised. While voting rights laws have evolved considerably since then, propertylessness, within the paradigm of propertied citizenship, is a form of civic exclusion and deviance. Roy uses the urban American homeless as a paradigmatic example of a group that is excluded from the rights of the propertied citizen, but the suburban families who have been displaced from their homes via foreclosure are also non-citizens within this paradigm.

Roy offers an alternative to homelessness for the propertyless, however. If homelessness is the paradigmatic counterexample to propertied citizenship in the First World, she casts informal housing or squatting as its equivalent in the Third World. And she draws attention to the fact that squatting is not solely limited to the developing world by profiling an American anarchist group that practices squatting as a form of resistance to the paradigm of propertied citizenship. Homes Not Jails employs squatting as both a symbolic challenge to policies that persecute the homeless and as a tactic to take advantage of the doctrine of adverse possession, which represents a path to legal ownership through a form of “sweat equity,” a concept more familiar to the Third World than to the First. If an abandoned property is occupied, rehabilitated, and remade into a livable space, adverse possession provides a way for the rejuvenated property’s occupiers to acquire legal ownership. This type of squatting is a kind of reincarnation of the one-night house in a slightly different form and without the extreme temporal constraints, but still a path to property ownership directly through occupation and labor rather than through an exchange of money.

“Taking” houses in this way has seen a resurgence in some of the places that were most severely ravaged by the foreclosure crisis. While it need not take place under literal cover of darkness, it operates on the border between deviance and legitimacy, and opens up an alternative way of accessing the privileges that are tied up with property ownership. The rules that had governed entry and membership to the propertied middle-class for decades were upended in the foreclosure crisis. In its aftermath, these alternative methods of property acquisition seem particularly apt.

References:

Elwood S, Lawson V, 2013, “Whose crisis? Spatial imaginaries of class, poverty and vulnerability”Environment and Planning A 45(1), 103-108.

Roy A, 2003, “Paradigms of propertied citizenship: Transnational techniques of analysis” Urban Affairs Review 38(4), 273-89.

Ward C, 2002, Cotters and Squatter: Housing’s Hidden History. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publishing.

Engaging the Public in Poverty Knowledge Research

Kidan Araya, University of Washington, Department of Geography

In a recent New York Times op-ed by Nicolas Kristof named “Professors, We Need You!,” Kristof criticized academics for making themselves and their research irrelevant by their constant focusing on publishing research that is largely quantitative, theoretical, specialized and therefore more difficult for non-academics to access and understand. He also criticized academics for their lack of engagement with the public through social media and other forms of outreach. Quite expectedly, the article attracted much criticism from academics stating that they do indeed consider themselves public intellectuals by teaching at public universities and that they are many academics engaged in social media to communicate their research to the public. Despite the complexities and arguments of contributing to the debate if professors are doing enough to make their research relevant and meaningful to the public, Kristof’s assessment that many academics have largely failed to make their research relevant to the public is a valid concern. Academics should begin reprioritizing and strategizing in order to make their scholarship communicable to the public. This blog will attempt to explore the various ways academics focused on studying poverty could make their research more relevant to the public.

Academic research that explores topics which remain universal to society such as research examining the phenomena of poverty should realistically not even be a hard sell to get the public to pay attention.  Ultimately, poverty is a persistent problem in the United States and globally and considering we are all impacted by poverty in one way or another, whether we have lived in poverty, benefited off of a system that produces poverty, or encountered poverty. Hence, it is safe to assume that people are genuinely interested in what academics are saying about the prevalence of poverty and their contributions to poverty knowledge in national and international conversations on poverty. So, how can academics engage in poverty knowledge while making it relevant to the public?

Discuss and reframe the production and reproduction of poverty

Academics can greatly contribute to public conversations about poverty through their poverty knowledge research by confirming and debunking public thought on poverty. Currently, there are multiple myths, images, and stories about poverty circulating out in society with many of those pushed by politicians and organizations with their own coveted agendas. Academics could use their poverty knowledge research to contribute to public insight on poverty through evidence-based research that could debunk certain, untrue yet popular discourses. Samuel Hickey in “Rethinking Poverty Analysis from the Margins: Insights from Northern Uganda” argues that the way poverty production and reproduction is analyzed and presented directly influences the response; therefore, the way that poverty is discussed in the public sphere by multiple actors dictate the way the public views and responds to poverty. This means that academic contributions to public conversations and debates about poverty can have profound implications on the public’s views, votes, and opinions of current public policy surrounding poverty issues. Academics could provide the public with insight into the root historical causes of poverty and the political, racial, economic, social, and environmental factors that contribute to making and keeping people poor. Research centered on poverty knowledge distributed widely could alter problematic narratives of poverty; it would be much harder for the public to buy into this idea that people keep themselves in poverty through acting irresponsibly when there is research actively communicated to people that deconstructs the narrative of personal responsibility and places this narrative in a context of political construction. Imagine a widely cited image of poverty such as the welfare queen, a woman who is using public assistance and purposefully “staying poor” to continue collecting welfare and food stamps to make herself wealthy. How could academic research such as Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner’s analysis in “Postneoliberalism and its Malcontents” of the uneven development and corporate welfare discourses of neoliberalism or Sanford Schram’s historical analysis of the political development of the social contract influence public opinion on welfare discourse in his book After Welfare? I would argue that if this sort of research was actively infused into the public conversation, whether through talking appearances on television shows, summary publications in national or state mass media or presented at community meetings and organizations, it would strongly influence public discourse around how poverty is produced and why it persists.

Disrupt the knowledge production system

“To acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use. Each of us is blessed in some particular way, whether we recognize our blessings or not. And each one of us, somewhere in our lives, must clear a space within that blessing where she can call upon whatever resources are available to her in the name of something that must be done.” — Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: Essays

Academics must acknowledge the privilege they have as being representatives of the most highly educated population in the world and bring their specialized expertise into public conversations about poverty. First, academics can devote to styling some of their publications and scholarship in a language which is written for people with a common knowledge in the subject and not necessarily a scholarly knowledge. Jenny Robinson in “Postcolonizing Geography: Tactics and Pitfalls” states that many disciplines in the academy in the early 20^th century such as Geography decided to focus on a more theoretical approach to scholarship which included writing research in a way that would only allow for scholars to understand and failed to lead research in a direction that universalized knowledge for all. Robinson argues that the parochial focus of research today commits “epistemic violence” by blocking out other populations from understanding academic knowledge. Writing research in a non-parochial manner that is conducive to universaling knowledge to all populations will make poverty knowledge open to the reading, understanding, and participation of non-academic persons.

Encourage underrepresented populations to actively participate

Along with the pursuit of making poverty knowledge open to the participation of non-academic persons, academics can be public intellectuals by making sure their research and teachings incorporate and reflect the racial, ethnic, class, nationality, and other types of diversity that are present in the public. In applying these lessons to the classroom, academics can assign readings from diverse scholars with different pedagogies, backgrounds, and perspectives in order to match the diversity found across classrooms today. Academics should tap into the diversity found in the academy already to better communicate and make poverty knowledge and research relevant. When students, particularly from underrepresented populations in the academy, are exposed to research written by academics that are from those communities or research focused on highlighting the cultural wealth of communities which are oftentimes framed as spaces of poverty, this effectively communicates that the knowledge, perspectives, and backgrounds of those students are valued and needed in the academy. Furthermore, this is a clear act of making academic research relevant to the public by demonstrating that their particular knowledge, perspectives, and lived experiences regarding poverty is necessary in the production of poverty knowledge. It is important to note that academics are among some of the most elite in society and most are not from impoverished or underrepresented backgrounds, therefore, the sorts of questions, ideas, and knowledge one who has lived/lives in poverty could bring to poverty knowledge research is critical and infinite. In a sense, this is related to Robinson and Doreen Massey’s statements about reworking linkages of knowledge and their critiques of the perception that knowledge should always come from the top-down to be legitimate. Cultivating scholarship to be produced within the communities that are constantly researched within poverty literature challenges those linkages by actively engaging students from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds and bringing their knowledge and experiences with poverty through a “bottom up” linkage.

Offer viable solutions and alternatives to the problem of poverty

Ultimately, if academics are going to contribute their poverty knowledge through research that deconstructs, provides context, and analyzes public discourses on poverty, academics should also try to provide insight on what they think potential effective approaches and solutions could be to problems as well. The work of J.K. Gibson-Graham explore this issue by challenging academics to be open to the possibility of offering alternatives to problematic, institutionalized structures such as capitalism that are reliant on producing and reproducing poverty. Overall, I agree in their assessment that academics could stand to come from a non-skeptical and more nurturing place around alternative solutions, and I think their recommendations of encouraging academics to be active in contributing creative alternatives is universal and critical for all research, especially poverty research. There are certainly academics, such as the ones previously mentioned and the academics that currently make up the Relational Poverty Network, who engage in several of the activities mentioned above into making poverty knowledge research relevant in public conversations. Yet there are many academics who could challenge themselves more to engage in one or more of these activities to better utilize their privilege and knowledge with the intention to contribute to not just producing poverty knowledge, but contributing poverty knowledge for public use. Ultimately, I would hope that bringing academic research to a more diverse audience within a public realm could trigger participation, engagement, and activism regarding poverty around the world.

iPads in the Laundromat

Nick Gottschall, University of Washington, Department of International Studies There’s a laundromat on Bellevue Avenue, near my Capitol Hill apartment, which I walk by almost daily. More than once I’ve been startled to notice the flashy screens of iPads and Android phones in the hands of waiting patrons inside. What are these toys, extravagant symbols of middle class consumerism that they are, doing in such a dingy setting? Surely they don’t belong amongst the tattered sweatpants, haggard faces and bored children, those universal fixtures of laundromats everywhere. My reactionary confusion about the seemingly jarring juxtaposition of the laundromat iPads arises from assumptions about poor people, their habits and characteristics. Of course to assume that these laundromat patrons are poor in the first place is problematic. In fact I likely hold in my mind a sort of false dichotomy between this neighborhood’s middle class twenty-something students, service and tech workers on the one hand, and older working-class people on the other. iPads and smart phones “belong” more to one of these groups than the other. Confronting these assumptions represents an effort towards something UC Berkeley professor Ananya Roy calls “unknowing poverty.” In her TED Talk entitled “(Un)Knowing Poverty,” Roy argues that “to unknow poverty is to make a shift from asking how we can help the poor, to asking how poverty is produced; to asking how wealth, power and privilege are maintained.” Roy’s statement resonates with one of the relational poverty seminar’s primary aims, to radically reorganize poverty priorities. This transformation is a call to relocate our obsession with “poor people,” those who experience poverty, in order to interrogate the workings of “powerful others,” or those who produce poverty. This new gaze entails an analytical shift: from the dependency of the welfare mom to the dependency of big business; from the transgressions of the urban addict to the crimes of capitalism; from the idiosyncrasies of rural lifestyles to the uninhibited march of “economic development;” from the misfortunes of the masses to the preferences of the privileged. “To unknow poverty,” asserts Roy, “is to make a shift from tinkering with charity that can do good to transforming the policies that enable wealth but impoverish poverty.” This question of charity and development in a globalized world is fraught. Roy calls particular attention to the ambivalence confronting those idealistic students who “belong to a can-do generation of socially-conscious millennials who want to catalyze change.” Despite their noble “ethics of global citizenship,” Roy points out that her students “want to volunteer in the slums of India, but they squirm at their encounter with the homeless panhandler on the streets of the liberal city of Berkeley. In other words, while poverty in the third world seems familiar, poverty at home, in proximity, seems strange, unknowable.” The “familiarity” of poverty in the developing world highlights particular shades of meaning within the word “poor.” Not only are Indian slum-dwellers, to use Roy’s example, “poor” due to their acute lack—of income, opportunities, healthcare, and so on. In the international imagination these people are also “poor” in the sense that they are pitiable, wretched, abject, and as such deserving of our sympathy and charity. However, this latter interpretation finds no purchase with the visible American poor, emblematized by Roy as “the homeless panhandler,” even in “the liberal city of Berkeley.” This millennial confrontation with the familiar-distant-poor/scary-proximate-poor conundrum is evident on the streets of Seattle’s University District. Here droves of young students contend for sidewalk space with panhandlers, street hawkers and loitering masses, any number of whom may be a member of King County’s 3,117 shelterless homeless, as recently reported by One Night Count. On campus it is common to hear tales, narrated with the appropriate balance of shock and self-aggrandizement, of shady characters or unfortunate incidents encountered on The Ave. The University’s safety notification emails, with their weekly litany of assaults and petty thefts, further reinforce an us-versus-them mentality, a sort of clash of cultures between the University’s educated elite and the neighborhood’s violent, conspicuous poor. Roy tells the story of Ranjan, a Kolkata slum resident who expresses puzzlement at the persistence of homelessness in the U.S. “How is this the case?” Ranjan asks. “Why doesn’t the government simply allow them to take over vacant land like we have? Aren’t they citizens? Don’t they have rights?” According to Roy, Ranjan “asks a third world question of the first world;” she implores us to do the same. What would such a question look like in the case of the University District? What is at stake when we seek to see proximate poverty as “familiar,” while at the same time striving to “unknow” it? The task at hand is undoubtedly a difficult one. To unknow poverty, Roy contends, is to find “the impossible space between two extremes: on the one hand, the hubris of benevolence…and on the other hand, the paralysis of cynicism.” In the University District, the coalition of nonprofit organizations forming the University District Service Providers Alliance is one manifestation of the attempt to wed service provision to civil rights education; individual care to policy advocacy. Poverty scholars speak of “contact zones,” or “mutable sites/moments of interaction in which differences are made explicit and can lead to new negotiations of identity, privilege, political responsibility and alliance” (Vicky Lawson and Sarah Elwood, “Encountering Poverty: Space, Class and Poverty Politics,” forthcoming). The opportunities for contact zones on campus, in the street, or within these nonprofits, are numerous. One challenge social service organizations face is breaking down traditional volunteer-client relationships of power. Yet, with issues like economic inequality, public transportation and gentrification gaining urgency across social classes, the interests of the poor and the non-poor become increasingly aligned. In fact, in pockets of Seattle, the line between poor and non-poor actors is already blurry. Newcomers to a U-District homeless shelter for young adults often remark that they can’t tell who is a volunteer and who is a homeless guest. It is almost a mark of pride for the community there that such boundaries are continually being redrawn, at least on the level of outward appearance. It’s a lesson I would do well to remember the next time I see the iPads in the laundromat.

Acknowledging, unlearning and relearning poverty knowledge

Elyse Gordon, University of Washington, Department of Geography

In my experience, any process of learning usually begins with actively unlearning. We need to recognize and unlearn before we can re-learn how to do something. Ask anyone trying to practice new habits: we must unlearn our old habits (be that donuts for breakfast, chronic stress, nail biting, multiple drinks at the end of the day to unwind, defensive and passive communication to avoid conflict…) before we can re-learn new habits.

This notion of ‘un-learning’ extends beyond habits. It is a vital part of critical thinking and growing into new epistemologies. Ananya Roy, in her beautiful and eloquent TEDxBerkeley talk, asks, “How can we ‘un-know’ our common assumptions about poverty?” She challenges us to grow into the discomfort of a messier, more complicated and relational understanding of poverty.

So, what might this look like?

First, it would recognize our current worldview about poverty. Unless you already identify as a member of the Relational Poverty Network and have devoted time to this unlearning process, chances are you’ve heard, and maybe even agree with, some of these common assumptions about poverty:

• poverty is a problem that can be fixed, if we just work hard enough
• poverty can be measured; it’s a numbers game
• if you are poor in the US, it’s because you haven’t worked hard enough or can’t find a good job
• the ‘third world’ is poor, and is need of help
• social innovation can solve poverty
• people shouldn’t depend on government assistance; these should be temporary measures while they learn the skills to be self-sufficient.

At this point, you might be saying, “wait, if I believe those things, does that mean I’ve done something wrong? I don’t know why I’d have to ‘unlearn’ these things about poverty – aren’t they true?”

There is no wrongdoing in initially taking these to be true; the media, public policy, NGOs and most social science research have reinforced these ideas about poverty and how to ‘fix it’. We recognize. We acknowledge. Now we start the hard work of “un-knowing”.

Un-learning is a painful process. It asks us to dismantle the scaffolding and architecture about how we make sense of the world. And, in the process of unlearning, we are not comforted with a guarantee of what new ways of knowing will emerge. We are left with a messiness that is, immediately, unresolved.

To un-know poverty might begin by negating the statements above.

• poverty is not a problem that can be fixed by just working hard enough
• poverty can not be measured; it’s not a numbers game
• if you are poor in the US, it’s not because you haven’t worked hard enough or can’t find a good job
• the ‘third world’ is not poor, and is not in need of help
• social innovation can not solve poverty
• people shouldn’t need to depend on government assistance; these should not be temporary measures while they learn the skills to be self-sufficient

This is a good starting point, in that it acknowledges and challenges our previously un-questioned beliefs about poverty. But this exercise of negation seems a bit reductive. It is too simplistic.

But, we’ve begun the process of unknowing. We’ve troubled the dominant knowledge, and given ourselves permission to ask something new and see things in a new way.

At this point, we can start to relearn poverty and poverty knowledge. Ananya Roy shares that her experiences in Calcutta highlighted how much poverty is a relational concept. To illustrate this, she shares the story of Ranjin, a slum-dweller, who sees himself as better off than an impoverished homeless person in the US, despite having lived in a slum for 12 years.

There is no uniform experience or definition of poverty.

This is the foundation of relearning poverty knowledge.

Much like Ananya’s own example, though, the process of relearning will be deeply personal. It asks us to look within ourselves and ask how our own identities, privilege and social position are constructed in relation to poverty, “the poor” and poor places.

In my own life, having negated the dominant assumptions, I can revisit the above list a third time, now with relational qualifiers.

• poverty is not a problem that can be fixed by just working hard enough; poverty is a process that will influence people and places differently at different times.
• poverty can not be easily measured; it is more than just numbers, because it is based on your context and social and cultural capital.
• if you are poor in the US, it’s not because you haven’t worked hard enough or can’t find a good job; it is likely a result of an oppressive system of late capitalism that has depleted the social safety net, gutted middle class jobs, and established economic policies that privilege corporate profit at the expense of the poor
• the ‘third world’ is not poor, and is not in need of help; in fact, the global South is rich with natural and social resources, and the global North are not ‘experts’ in solving poverty “over there”
• social innovation can not solve poverty; it might be a component in creating conditions for greater equity, but innovation alone cannot “solve” poverty.
• people shouldn’t need to depend on government assistance; the social safety net should provide for those in need without inflicting shame or conditions. And a healthy economy would provide more middle-wage jobs such that fewer people would need assistance in the first instance.

This is not an exhaustive list, of course. It exemplifies my own personal and relational understanding of poverty, based on years of work with youth empowerment nonprofit programs. These experiences made my privilege  quite visible, and challenged my assumptions about poverty and my ideas about expertise, benevolence and innovation.

I am still re-learning poverty through a relational lens. This will be a lifetime effort. Acknowledging that the dominant assumptions about poverty are not true, (and that they are actually detrimental to making a more just world), we make space for new relations, new insights, and new epistemologies.

To un-learn is to ask questions in a new way. To re-learn is to look for answers with new eyes and ears. As Ananya says, to “un-know poverty”, we must ask how poverty is produced and how wealth, power and privilege are maintained. We are asking new questions in the pursuit of new poverty knowledge.

Poverty and Inequality not Related — Really?

Vicky Lawson and Sarah Elwood, University of Washington

David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times, has recently made the rounds saying that there are no demonstrable links between the causes of poverty and of inequality.  Given our research as social scientists, we find this impossible to understand; but it does make us reflect on how this framing of the disconnect circulates as legitimate and unquestioned.

How is it possible that the argument that poverty and inequality are not related is legitimated on sites such as the New York Times, National Public Radio and the like?  Because it makes those more privileged in the US comfortable to view things this way.

Our research traces the causes of inequality

Poverty is produced by powerful others who lobby from the outside or work on the inside to create a tax code that increasingly benefits those with wealth at the top of our unequal income spectrum.

Poverty is produced by an economic and social system based on extraction and accumulation of value.  Historically, one role of government has been to create opportunity for sure.  But another has been to stem the direst inequalities inherent to our system.  Why have we have let the latter be so thoroughly eroded?

Poverty is produced by elites, think tanks and politicians who circulate ideas and lobby for policies that benefit themselves not the poor.  Think of the debate over the minimum wage which shames the poor for being greedy and for taking jobs away from other (very poor) people.  Think of arguments for de-funding SNAP that suggest this program allows people to “sit on their couch while the federal government feeds them”, think of union-busting behaviors that villainize working people for demanding a living wage, paid sick days and a secure retirement.  Think of corporate welfare, the ultimate hypocrisy that goes unremarked.  Even as we shudder to think that poor people might receive a few hundred dollars in paltry assistance, we unblinkingly allot billions of tax dollars to private corporations that yield millions for executives and stockholders (think Walmart, Boeing, big oil and so on).

Poverty is framed by powerful others who set the terms of debate: that the poor are flawed, lacking and in need of reform.  They say that all poor people need are opportunities rather than a living minimum wage; that poor people need discipline rather than adequate affordable housing; that poor people need our scorn or disgust rather than material supports from our rich country.  It is tough to take advantage of opportunities when you are working as many hours as possible (working poor) to make ends meet – when exactly will the long term and expensive schooling that may actually access a well-paid job happen?

Why don’t we see the double standards, myths and power plays that allow us to continue to claim that poverty and inequality are unrelated?  Because our corporatized media, our education system, our cultural consensus all refuse to look at privilege instead of poverty.  All refuse to interrogate the systematic, structural connections between poverty and inequality.

Of course opportunities matter and individual effort is important.  But, arguing that poor people have responsibility to improve their lives does not mean that we can ignore how inequalities (of money, political voice, etc.) limit what they alone can do.

Let’s shine a light on inequality and privilege.  Let’s diagnose privilege and have a new and different conversation.