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.