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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Poverty
It's easy to feel overwhelmed by all of the injustices that we see in the world. We don't know what to do and might think that we don't have anything to offer. But by using our gifts in collaboration with others, we can do more together than we ever could on our own. Activist Terence Lester knows it's hard to change the world. But mobilizing and acting together empowers us to do what we can't do as isolated individuals. Lester looks at the obstacles that prevent us from getting involved, and he offers practical ways that we can accomplish things together as groups, families, churches, and communities. He helps us find our place in the larger picture, discerning the unique ways we can contribute and make a difference. By connecting with our neighbors and discovering our own paths of service, we can drastically change how we follow Christ and see God moving in the world. Togetherness and community give visible testimony of the power of the gospel. In this broken world, the body of Christ can transform society-when we stand together.
Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has the United States faced such a prolonged period of high unemployment and underemployment. Recovery from the "Great Recession" that began in 2008 has been slow, and is projected to remain sluggish over the next several years, while another shock to the global economy could erase the meager gains of the past months. Economic conditions remain fragile and employment challenges show no sign of letting up. With persistently high unemployment and underemployment-and growing inequality in wages-an increasing number of American families are no longer adequately supported by employment income and basic benefits. Many older workers have "retired" before they are ready, and many young workers cannot find a foothold in the job market. A silent crisis is underway, with huge social and economic costs for the nation. Working and Living in the Shadow of Economic Fragility examines the current state of employment through historical, macroeconomic, cultural, sociological and policy lenses, in order to address fundamental questions about the role and value of work in America today. The book offers suggestions for how to address the short- and long-term challenges of rebuilding a society of opportunity with meaningful and sustaining jobs as the foundation of the American middle-class.
What would schools and communities look like if the health and well-being of all our children were our highest priorities? More important than test scores, profits, or real estate values? What actions would we take if we wanted to guarantee that all our children were growing up with what they needed to be healthy, happy, and successful-and not just some of them? The United States was once among the healthiest countries in the world. As of now, it is ranked no better than twenty-ninth. Those who bear the brunt of our worsening health are the poor, people of color, and, most of all, our children. All Children Are All Our Children situates our ongoing health crisis within the larger picture of inequality and the complex interplay of systems in the U.S. based on class, privilege, racism, sexism, and the ongoing tension between the ideals of democracy and the realities of corporate capitalism. Public education is caught in the middle of those tensions. All Children Are All Our Children begins by defining what we mean by health, looking at the many factors that support or undermine it, and then identifies steps that can be taken locally in our schools and in our communities that can support the health and well-being of our young people and their families, even as we work towards necessary change at the state and national policy level.
The definitive edition of Catholic Worker cofounder Peter Maurin's Easy Essays, including 74 previously unpublished works Although Peter Maurin is well known among people connected to the Catholic Worker movement, his Catholic Worker co-founder and mentee Dorothy Day largely overshadowed him. Maurin was never the charismatic leader that Day was, and some Workers found his idiosyncrasies challenging. Reticent to write or even speak much about his personal life, Maurin preferred to present his beliefs and ideas in the form of Easy Essays, published in the New York Catholic Worker. Featuring 482 of his essays, as well as 87 previously unpublished ones, this text offers a great contribution to the corpus of twentieth-century Catholic life. At first glance, Maurin's Easy Essays appear overly simplistic and preposterous. But upon further investigation, his essays are much more complex and nuanced. Packed with demanding ideas meant to convey dense information and encourage the listener to ponder different ways to understand and interact with reality, his short poetic phrases became his modus operandi for communicating his vision and became a hallmark of his public theology. Each essay contained anywhere from one to ten or more stanzas and were part of a larger arrangement, often titled. Within the larger arrangements were individual essays, which were also titled and arranged in such a manner as to support the overall thesis. Many individual essays were later repeated in slightly altered forms in new arrangements. Previous arrangements were also repeated that omitted or added an essay. Providing scholarly and contextual information for the modern reader, this annotated collection includes more than 350 footnotes which offer a layer of intelligibility that explains Maurin's use of obscure references to historical people and events that would have been common knowledge for readers during the 1930s. When appropriate, the footnotes explain why Maurin chose to cite a person or event. A scholarly Introduction offers a robust synthesis of contemporary scholarship on Maurin and the Catholic Worker that considers radical Catholicism and questions regarding race, ethnicity, religious difference, and gender, because many of Maurin's essays take up these themes. This book shapes the ways Maurin is read in the present day and the ways leftist Catholicism is understood as part of twentieth-century history.
What would schools and communities look like if the health and well-being of all our children were our highest priorities? More important than test scores, profits, or real estate values? What actions would we take if we wanted to guarantee that all our children were growing up with what they needed to be healthy, happy, and successful-and not just some of them? The United States was once among the healthiest countries in the world. As of now, it is ranked no better than twenty-ninth. Those who bear the brunt of our worsening health are the poor, people of color, and, most of all, our children. All Children Are All Our Children situates our ongoing health crisis within the larger picture of inequality and the complex interplay of systems in the U.S. based on class, privilege, racism, sexism, and the ongoing tension between the ideals of democracy and the realities of corporate capitalism. Public education is caught in the middle of those tensions. All Children Are All Our Children begins by defining what we mean by health, looking at the many factors that support or undermine it, and then identifies steps that can be taken locally in our schools and in our communities that can support the health and well-being of our young people and their families, even as we work towards necessary change at the state and national policy level.
We are on the eve of the deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, that were promised and pledged in the year 2000 by 189 nations of the world. It was envisaged to overcome extreme poverty and multiple deprivations existing in the society. With barely less than three years left to reach 2015, it would be interesting to study if there is a growing equality of opportunity between people and among nations. This is an issue that now dominates every discourse on development debate in the third millennium. The pace of development has been accompanied by rising disparities within nations and between nations. The most significant of these being gender disparity. Despite a relentless struggle to equalize opportunities between women and men, the issue remains an unfinished agenda and eludes the much desired change. This book could not have come at a more appropriate time. This publication consisting of contributions across Central Asia and South Asia adds to the slender collection of literature in understanding the present challenges and concerns that grip these regions in achieving the millennium development goals by 2015. It highlights sharp gender inequalities and the barriers to social and economic development that grip the region. This book will be a great source of information in helping scholars and researchers and also will contribute significantly in framing policy recommendations by the concerned countries.
With the failure of market reform to generate sustained growth in many countries of the Global South, poverty reduction has become an urgent moral and political issue in the last several decades. In practice, considerable research shows that high levels of inequality are likely to produce high levels of criminal and political violence. On the road to development, states cannot but grapple with the challenges posed by poverty and wealth distribution. Social Forces and States explains the reasons behind distinct distributional and poverty outcomes in three countries: South Korea, Chile, and Mexico. South Korea has successfully reduced poverty and has kept inequality low. Chile has reduced poverty but inequality remains high. Mexico has confronted higher levels of poverty and high inequality than either of the other countries. Judith Teichman takes a comparative historical approach, focusing upon the impact of the interaction between social forces and states. Distinct from approaches that explain social well-being through a comparative examination of social welfare regimes, this book probes more deeply, incorporating a careful consideration of how historical contexts and political struggles shaped very different development trajectories, welfare arrangements, and social possibilities.
Analysing the status of agrarian justice and its relation with the national slogan of "gross national happiness"(GNH) in Bhutan, this monograph deals with food insecurity, resource asymmetry and growth in the political economy perspective. In this tiny Himalayan nation under absolute democratic monarchy, there are huge inequities in the ethos of general income and consumption poverty and a fundamental transformation in the political economy of this south Asian nation is in urgent need. Readers of this monograph would be mainly from Nepal, Bhutan and India, though those who have interest in the economy and society of the Himalayas would also be the beneficiaries. It attempts to highlight understanding about the specificities of south Asia and some novel features of poverty in this region.
Most information about the incomes of people in Britain today, such as provided by official statistics, tells us how much inequality there is or how many poor people there are in a given year and compares those numbers with the corresponding statistics from the previous year. Missing from snapshot pictures like these is information about whether the people who were poor one year are the same people who are poor the following year; and the circumstances of those with middle-income or top-income origins are not tracked over time. This book fills in the missing information. The author likens Britain's income distribution to a multi-story apartment building with the numbers of residents on the different floors corresponding to the concentration of people at different income levels in any particular year. The poorest are in the basement, the richest are in the penthouse, and the majority somewhere in between. This book assesses how much movement there is between floors, the frequency of moves, whether the distance travelled has been changing over the last two decades, and whether basement dwellers ever reach the penthouse. Using the British Household Panel Survey, which has followed and interviewed the same people annually since 1991, it documents the patterns of income mobility and poverty dynamics in Britain, shows how they have changed over the last two decades, and explores the reasons why. It draws attention to the relationships between changes in income and changes in other aspects of people's lives - not only in their jobs, earnings, benefits, and credits, but also in the households within which they live (people marry and divorce; children are born). Trends over time are also related to changes in Britain's labour market and the reforms to the tax-benefit system introduced by the Labour government in the late-1990s.
This volume examines the persistence of poverty - both rural and urban - in developing countries, and the response of local governments to the problem, exploring the roles of governments, NGOs, and CSOs in national and sub-national agenda-setting, policy-making, and poverty-reduction strategies. It brings together a rich variety of in-depth country and international studies, based on a combination of original data-collection and extensive research experience in developing countries. Taking a bottom-up and multi-dimensional perspective of poverty and well-being as the starting point, the authors develop a convincing set of arguments for putting the priorities of poor people first on any development agenda, thus carving out an undisputable role for local governance in interplay with higher-up governance actors and institutions.
"I never felt he left me or our marriage or the children. I felt he was leaving the farm problems". These words are from a woman reflecting on the farm crisis of the 1980s, the greatest economic disaster to hit rural America since the Depression. During this period, hundreds of thousands of farmers lost their farms and farm communities were irrevocably altered. As Kathryn Dudley demonstrates in this book, the crisis gave rise to a devastating social trauma that continues to affect farmers today. Through interviews with residents of an agricultural county in western Minnesota, Dudley chronicles the experience of financial failure in a culture that extols the virtues of independent business management, competitive production and middle-class self-sufficiency. Media images of the farm crisis fostered the impression that a majority of farmers banded together to protest the forced sales of neighbouring farms. Dudley counters this misleading view with her perceptive analysis of the local "culture of suspicion" that rejects political activism, discourages solidarity among neighbours and regards deeply indebted farmers as bad managers who deserve to lose their farms. Farming as a way of life turns out to be not a cultural refuge from the impersonal forces of capitalism, but emblematic of the very spirit of enterprise that animates a market-oriented society. With its focus on the moral dimension of economic loss and dislocation, this book raises far-reaching social questions: What does it take to be middle class in America? What kind of community is possible in a capitalist society?
Unique in its approach and in the variety of methods and data employed, this book is the first of its kind to provide an in-depth evaluation of the financial system of Thailand, a proto-typical Asian developing economy. Using a wealth of primary source qualitative and quantitative data, including survey data collected by the author, it evaluates the impact of specific financial institutions, markets for credit and insurance, and government policies on growth, inequality, and poverty at the macro, regional, and village level in Thailand. Useful not only as a guide to the Thai economy but more importantly as a means of assessing the impact that financial institutions and policy variation can have at the macro- and micro-level, including the distribution of gains and losses, this book will be invaluable to academics and policymakers with an interest in development finance.
Emerging from a public colloquium on the criminalization of poverty, this volume critically interrogates how state and private practices have increasingly come to over-regulate people with severely limited economic resources, and understands this regulation as part of the dynamics of liberal capitalism.
A wide-ranging, interconnected anthology presents a diversity of feminist contributions to digital humanities In recent years, the digital humanities has been shaken by important debates about inclusivity and scope-but what change will these conversations ultimately bring about? Can the digital humanities complicate the basic assumptions of tech culture, or will this body of scholarship and practices simply reinforce preexisting biases? Bodies of Information addresses this crucial question by assembling a varied group of leading voices, showcasing feminist contributions to a panoply of topics, including ubiquitous computing, game studies, new materialisms, and cultural phenomena like hashtag activism, hacktivism, and campaigns against online misogyny. Taking intersectional feminism as the starting point for doing digital humanities, Bodies of Information is diverse in discipline, identity, location, and method. Helpfully organized around keywords of materiality, values, embodiment, affect, labor, and situatedness, this comprehensive volume is ideal for classrooms. And with its multiplicity of viewpoints and arguments, it's also an important addition to the evolving conversations around one of the fastest growing fields in the academy. Contributors: Babalola Titilola Aiyegbusi, U of Lethbridge; Moya Bailey, Northeastern U; Bridget Blodgett, U of Baltimore; Barbara Bordalejo, KU Leuven; Jason Boyd, Ryerson U; Christina Boyles, Trinity College; Susan Brown, U of Guelph; Lisa Brundage, CUNY; micha cardenas, U of Washington Bothell; Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown U; Danielle Cole; Beth Coleman, U of Waterloo; T. L. Cowan, U of Toronto; Constance Crompton, U of Ottawa; Amy E. Earhart, Texas A Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, U of Colorado Boulder; Julia Flanders, Northeastern U Library; Sandra Gabriele, Concordia U; Brian Getnick; Karen Gregory, U of Edinburgh; Alison Hedley, Ryerson U; Kathryn Holland, MacEwan U; James Howe, Rutgers U; Jeana Jorgensen, Indiana U; Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College, CUNY; Dorothy Kim, Vassar College; Kimberly Knight, U of Texas, Dallas; Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson U; Sharon M. Leon, Michigan State; Izetta Autumn Mobley, U of Maryland; Padmini Ray Murray, Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology; Veronica Paredes, U of Illinois; Roopika Risam, Salem State; Bonnie Ruberg, U of California, Irvine; Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel), U of California, Santa Barbara; Anastasia Salter, U of Central Florida; Michelle Schwartz, Ryerson U; Emily Sherwood, U of Rochester; Deb Verhoeven, U of Technology, Sydney; Scott B. Weingart, Carnegie Mellon U.
Head Start, Job Corps, Foster Grandparents, College Work-Study,
VISTA, Community Action, and the Legal Services Corporation are
familiar programs, but their tumultuous beginning has been largely
forgotten. Conceived amid the daring idealism of the 1960s, these
programs originated as weapons in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty,
an offensive spearheaded by a controversial new government agency.
Within months, the Office of Economic Opportunity created an array
of unconventional initiatives that empowered the poor, challenged
the established order, and ultimately transformed the nation's
attitudes toward poverty.
The world has needs. Children are orphaned, refugees are displaced and families are devastated by natural disasters. But God is greater than those needs, and he works through his people to accomplish healing and transformation. God calls us to integral mission- obeying both the Great Commission and the Great Commandment in ministering to people's spiritual, physical, emotional and social well-being. This curriculum from World Relief is designed to mobilize the church to engage the great causes of our day, stand with the vulnerable and meet the needs of our neighbors as Jesus did. These ten sessions show how shaping our fundamental beliefs and values lead to better actions and results. Together we can alleviate poverty, welcome the stranger and transform communities at home and around the world. Join with others in learning how to love God, love your neighbors and put that love into action.
In the three works contained in this volume, written in 1797-8,
Bentham offers a detailed exposition of his plan for the reform of
the English poor laws.
For more than four decades, Hugh Segal has been one of the leading voices of progressive conservatism in Canada. A self-described Red Tory warrior who disdains "bootstrap" approaches to poverty, he has always promoted policies, especially a basic annual income, to help the most economically vulnerable. Why would a life-long Tory support something so radical? In this revealing memoir, Segal shares how his life and experiences brought him to this most unlikely of places, beginning with his childhood in a poor immigrant family in Montreal to his time as a chief of staff for Prime Minister Mulroney and to his more recent work as an advisor on a basic income pilot project for the Ontario Liberal government. This book is a passionate argument not only for why a basic annual income makes economic sense, but for why it is the right thing to do.
A billion people, roughly half of all city dwellers in the
developing world, live in squatter settlements. The most famous of
these settlements are the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, which have
existed for more than half a century and continue to outpace the
rest of the city in growth.
"Julia" nervously emerges from her shabby tent in the suburban wastelands on the outskirts of Madrid to face another day of survival in one of Europe's most problematic ghettos: she is homeless, wanted by the police, and addicted to heroin and cocaine. She is also five months pregnant and rarely makes contact with support services. Welcome to the city shadows in Valdemingomez: a lawless landscape of drugs and violence where the third world meets the Wild West. Briggs and Monge entered this area with only their patience, some cigarettes and a mobile phone and collected vivid testimonies and images of Julia and others like her who live there. This important book documents what they found, locating these people's stories and situations in a political, economic and social context of spatial inequality and oppressive mechanisms of social control.
The Caged Phoenix: Can India Fly? argues through a fine blend of theory and new empirical evidence, that despite the promises of Independence and liberalization India continues to remain caged in backwardness. Why does the phenomenal growth story not translate into development? Why is the much vaunted human-resource capital not taking India towards excellence? How can deprivation and prosperity live so easily side by side? Questioning traditional thought, Dipankar Gupta critically examines how the elite is reluctant to acknowledge that structural impediments, and not cultural factors, deny growth benefits to the majority of one billion plus Indians how the wealth of a few is intimately tied to the poverty of many the close link between growth in high technological sectors of the Indian economy on the one side, and sweat shops and rural stagnation on the other how affluence came to the developed West only when general standards arose across all social classes Combining scholarship with an easy, engaging style, Dipankar Gupta enters uncharted territories to question why, despite so much talent, human resource and an open society, India is still waiting to fly.
The riveting story of control over the mobility of poor migrants, and how their movements shaped current perceptions of class and status in the United States Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants - consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves - populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations. Vagrants and Vagabonds examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called "vagrants," arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US. Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic.
This open access book presents the findings of the author's 3 decades of studying China's evolving anti-poverty strategies. It argues that much of the billions that nations spend yearly on economic aid is used inefficiently or to treat the symptoms but not the root causes of poverty. China, however, has evolved an effective sustainable alternative by providing the means for self-reliance to not only relieve economic poverty but also poverty of spirit. As a result, the success of China's historic war on poverty has been due not only to top-down visionary leadership but also to the bottom-up initiatives of an empowered populace unswervingly united in ending poverty. From 1993 to 2019, the author drove over 200,000 km around China and interviewed hundreds of people from all walks of life as he explored the evolution of China's anti-poverty strategies from simplistic aid and redistribution, which often engendered dependency and poverty of spirit. Over time, the philosophy shifted to empowerment by fostering self-reliance-or as Chinese put it, "blood production rather than blood transfusion." The primary method of empowerment was to provide modern infrastructure, "Roads first, then riches," so rural dwellers in remote Inner Mongolia or the Himalayan heights of Tibet had the same access to markets, jobs and internet for e-commerce as their urban counterparts. People who seized the opportunities and prospered first then used their newfound wealth and experience to help others. The stories in this book include a Tibetan entrepreneur whose family was impoverished in spite of 300 years of service to the Panchen Lama, or the farm girl with 4 years of education who now has several international schools, a biotechnology company and poverty alleviation projects across China, or the photographer who walked 40,000 km through deserts to chronicle the threat of desertification. Their tales underscore how diverse people across China helped make possible China's success in alleviating absolute poverty and why Chinese are now confident in achieving a "moderately prosperous society."
WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION Chosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBC Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 'Restlessly inventive, brutally graceful, startlingly beautiful ... a landmark debut' Guardian 'Oh my God, he's just stirring me. Destroying me' Michaela Coel 'A poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy' Max Porter 'Takes us into new literary territory ... impressive' Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman (Books of the Year) 'It's simply stunning. Every image is a revelation' Terrance Hayes What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground? In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives. Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: 'I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.' |
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