Negotiating poverty and privilege: Middle class place-making and poverty politics

Victoria Lawson, Sarah Elwood and Sam Nowak
University of Washington

We explore processes of relational place-making to investigate how Middle class-ness (hereafter MC) is constituted or reworked. We begin our investigation from the ways in which people consolidate or transform their class identities through remaking their neighborhoods. The community and political work MC actors take up in their neighborhoods reflects their imaginaries of what a MC neighborhood should ideally be and how to achieve it. Drawing on empirical research in Seattle, our project extends ongoing discussions of place-making and class identities with a specific focus on how these processes express and reflect the poverty politics of MC actors. We explore links between the production of MC landscapes and particular forms of poverty governance and poverty politics. We are especially interested in progressive, alliance-building moments that are surprising in the context of much prior research on the reproduction of social difference.

Victoria Lawson’s website: http://faculty.washington.edu/lawson/
Sarah Elwood’s website: http://faculty.washington.edu/selwood/