Years after the Great Recession, the economy is still weak, and an unprecedented number of workers have sunk into long spells of unemployment. Cut Loose provides a vivid and moving account of the experiences of some of these men and women, through the example of a historically important group: autoworkers. Their well-paid jobs on the assembly lines built a strong middle class in the decades after World War II. But today, they find themselves beleaguered in a changed economy of greater inequality and risk, one that favors the well-educated or well-connected. Their declining fortunes in recent decades tell us something about what the white-collar workforce should expect to see in the years ahead, as job-killing technologies and the shipping of work overseas take away even more good jobs. Cut Loose offers a poignant look at how the long-term unemployed struggle in today's unfair economy to support their families, rebuild their lives, and overcome the shame and self-blame they deal with on a daily basis. It is also a call to action a blueprint for a new kind of politics, one that offers a measure of grace in a society of ruthless advancement.

There has been considerable interest in recent years in the ability of non-governmental organisations to work with the rural poor in developing countries in order to improve their quality of life and economic status through the provision of credit, skills training, and other inputs for income-generation programmes. This book brings together the results of 16 evaluations in 4 countries (Bangladesh, India, Uganda, and Zimbabwe) to provide a detailed assessment of the contribution that NGOs make to rural poverty alleviation. The results indicate that NGO projects are successful when they build in a high degree of participation, when the staff are committed to the goals of the project, and when they are managed by strong and competent leaders. Many of the projects studied contributed to increases in income and welfare. However, not all projects were successful, contrary to received wisdom about the efficacy of NGO interventions. many failed to reach the very poorest, most were costly to implement, and few of the projects demostrated an ability to continue once external funding was withdrawn. These findingd provide string support for viewing NGOs as a mechanism for helping to reduce rural poverty, but also demonstrate that many of the interventions are isolated or one-off. The impact of NGOs could be heightened by increasing the size of the intervention, encouraging greater cooperation among NGOs, and by fostering closer cooperation with governments. This study will make an impact in the development community, and its conclusions will help shape NGO and poverty agendas in the coming years. The book will appeal to all those concerned with rural development, NGOs, and development programmes.

An examination of the ways that digital technologies play an increasingly important role in the lives of precarious workers, far beyond the gig economy apps like Uber and Lyft. Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.

Set against the backdrop of deteriorating living conditions for hundreds of millions of people in developing and debtor countries, this volume concentrates on the structural adjustment policies designed to facilitate debt repayment and to stabilize indebted economies and the effects these policies have on the human rights of affected peoples. Conducted by contributors from various disciplines, this analysis provides distinctive insights into the relationship between international economic decisions and human welfare. The volume begins with general chapters on the issue of world debt; the various perceptions of debtors and creditors and the general consequences of the crisis. The specifics of the right to development are presented along with an explanation of and a rationale for this particular project on debt and human rights. The social, political, and economic consequences of the debt crisis and of the adjustment policies designed to alleviate it are presented by academic analysts as well as economists involved in dealing with poverty and equity issues at the international financial agencies. The book concludes with contributions from NGO representatives. These chapters discuss policy change and popular participation. The complex issues of debt and international economics are examined from a variety of perspectives. World Debt and the Human Condition's unifying element is a shared concern for the advancement of human dignity and the protection of the basic human rights of all those affected by the current international debt crisis and by current international economic policies and development strategies.

Brings together the analysis of older, mostly local welfare policies (including their legal framings and their change over time) with the history of social policy developed by the state and operated at a national level. Explores also the interaction of various layers of and actors in welfare policy, i.e. of poor relief, social reform policies and the unfolding welfare state over time, including often neglected elements of these policies such as for instance protective policies at the work place, housing policy, child protection, and prostitution policies. Making innovative use of legal, quantitative, and other material, the author describes how policies of inclusion into and exclusion from access to social insurance coverage shaped social relations within and beyond the world of work. The study demonstrates how definitions of what constituted need have served historically to produce divergent visions and treatment of male and female poverty, and how these historical biases have continued to shape and biased the conceptual apparatus of research into the history of welfare and social policies.

The second volume of Helen Forrester's powerful, painful and ultimately uplifting four-volume autobiography of her poverty-stricken childhood in Liverpool during the Depression. The Forrester family are slowly winning their fight for survival. But life remains extremely tough for fourteen-year-old Helen. Along with caring for her younger siblings and suffering terrible hardships she is also battling with her parents to persuade them to allow her to earn her own living. Helen is desperate to lead her own life after the years of neglect and inadequate schooling. Written with an unflinching eye, Helen's account of her continuing struggles against severe malnutrition and dirt (she has her first bath in four years) and, above all, the selfish demands of her parents, is deeply shocking. But Helen's fortitude and her ability to find humour in the most harrowing of situations make this make this a story of amazing courage and perseverance.

This book is designed to improve the education of elementary school children with low school-readiness skills (low SES children) by preventing their misidentification as learning disabled. It is built on the premise that the time and money spent on special education services will be better used if educators focus on the needs of children with low school readiness skills before their deficits become so great that neither intervention nor remediation will work, and before the childrenAEs self perceptions are so badly damaged that they quit trying to succeed and accept failure.Poverty Is NOT a Learning Disability challenges educators and parents to consider how low expectationsua odeficit perceptionoeucan affect a child's achievement and stresses optimism as a central tenet of elementary schoolsAE day-to-day teaching/learning programs and school-community relationships. The authors emphasize that an attitude of optimism is strongly connected to hope for the future and crucial to providing children with a positive vision of what they can accomplish. This resource also covers how to build trusting relationships throughout the school community, among teachers, administrators, the school staff, and parents.aChildren inevitably endeavor to fit the words, actions, and deeds of those around them into narratives of their own. The authors conveyahow vitally important it is foramembers of the education community to work togetherato ensure that youngstersareceive a view of the future that inspires hope and validates the potential of each child.

What are the underlying causes of chronic poverty? Can 'development beyond neoliberalism' offer the strategies required to challenge such persistent forms of poverty, particularly through efforts to promote citizenship amongst poor people? Drawing on case-study evidence from Africa, Latin America and South Asia, the contributions critically examine different attempts to 'govern' chronic poverty via the promotion of particular forms and notions of citizenship, with a specific focus on the role of community-based approaches, social policy and social movements. Poverty is seen here as deriving from underlying patterns of uneven development, involving processes of capitalism and state formation that foster inequality-generating mechanisms and particularly disadvantaged social categories. Sceptics tend to deride the emphasis under current 'inclusive' forms of Liberalism on tackling poverty through the promotion of citizenship as inevitably depoliticising and disempowering for poor people, and our cases do suggest that citizenship-based strategies rarely alter the underlying basis of poverty. However, our evidence also offers some support to those optimists who suggest that progressive moves towards poverty reduction and citizenship formation have become more rather than less likely at the current juncture. The promotion of citizenship emerges here as a significant but incomplete effort to challenge poverty that persists over time. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Development Studies.

This book explores a novel methodological approach which combines analytical techniques from linguistics and geography to bring fresh insights to the study of poverty. Using Geographical Text Analysis, it maps the discursive construction of poverty in the UK and compares the results to what administrative data reveal. The analysis draws together qualitative and quantitative techniques from corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, Geographical Information Science, and the spatial humanities. By identifying the place-names that occur within close proximity to search terms associated with to poverty it shows how different newspapers use place to foreground different aspects of poverty (including employment, housing, money, and benefits), and how the London-centric nature of newspaper reporting dominates the discursive construction of UK poverty. This book demonstrates how interdisciplinary research methods can illuminate complex social issues and will appeal to researchers in a number of disciplines from sociology, geography and the spatial humanities, economics, linguistics, health, and public policy, in addition to policymakers and practitioners.

New York Times bestselling author Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes is "one of the best books ever written about how poverty influences learning, and vice versa" (The Washington Post). What would it take? That was the question that Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children -- not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in their lives -- their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents. Whatever It Takes is a tour de force of reporting, an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but also of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, often against great odds. Carefully researched and deeply affecting, this is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time.

For nearly four decades, China's manufacturing boom has been powered by the labor of 287 million rural migrant workers, who travel seasonally between villages where they farm for subsistence and cities where they work. Yet recently local governments have moved away from manufacturing and toward urban expansion and construction as a development strategy. As a result, at least 88 million rural people to date have lost rights to village land. In Beneath the China Boom, Julia Chuang follows the trajectories of rural workers, who were once supported by a village welfare state and are now landless. This book provides a view of the undertow of China's economic success, and the periodic crises-a rural fiscal crisis, a runaway urbanization-that it first created and now must resolve.

Absolute poverty causes about one third of all human deaths, some 18 million annually, and blights billions of lives with hunger and disease. Developing universalizable norms aimed at tackling absolute poverty and the complex and multilayered problems associated with it, this book considers the levels, trends and determinants of absolute poverty and global inequality. Examining whether much faster progress against absolute poverty is possible through reductions in national and global inequalities that produce economic growth for poor countries and households, this book suggests that diverse moral views imply that international agencies as well as the citizens, corporations and governments of affluent countries bear a moral responsibility to reduce absolute poverty. In considering strategies of eradication through specific policies and structural reforms it is argued that because of its moral importance and requirement for only modest efforts and resources, the goal of overcoming absolute poverty must be given much higher political priority by international agencies and governments of affluent countries. Suggesting that these agencies should be encouraged to facilitate and promote new initiatives, this book concludes with a discussion of how such initiatives might be realized.

aReid persuasively demonstrates that the experience of exclusion, characteristic of relative poverty, is as critical a health issue as lack of material resources and negative health behaviours. She] blends the theories of health promotion with feminist and social justice theories and] critiques and builds on the dominant discourses of health and individual responsibility to demonstrate how these discourses are both taken up and resisted by the women she came to know. This work persuasively demonstrates how health is a social justice issue, investiages the complexities of examining womenas health from an interdisciplinary perspective, and illuminates important policy implications.a aAllison Tom, University of British Columbia

This is the first volume in an ambitious new series-"Patterns of Potential Human Progress"-inspired by the UN Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) and other initiatives to improve the global condition. The first and most fundamental of these goals-reducing poverty worldwide-is the focus of this book. Using the large-scale computer program called International Futures (IFs), developed over three decades at the prestigious University of Denver Graduate School of International Studies, this book explores the most extensive set of forecasts of global poverty ever made-providing a wide range of scenarios based on an authoritative array of data. It transcends the "$1 a day" baseline measure of poverty and probes important concepts like income poverty gaps and relative poverty. The forecasts are long-term, looking 50 years into the future, far beyond the 2015 date set out by the MDGs. They are geographically rich, spanning the entire globe and drilling down to the country level, including one of the most important global focal points, India. The poverty forecasts in this book, and all the volumes in the series, are fully integrated in perspective across a wide range of human development arenas including demographics, economics, politics, agriculture, energy, and the environment. Full of colorful and thoughtfully designed graphs, tables, maps, and other visual presentations of data and forecasts, this large-format inaugural volume ensures that the "Patterns of Potential Human Progress" series will become an indispensable resource for every development professional, student, professor, library, and indeed, country around the world.

In 2000, the first social agenda in the history of the European Union was launched, and the endeavor to combat poverty came increasingly to the forefront as a specific area for EU policy cooperation and coordination. Regrettably, however, little progress has been achieved so far, either at the national or European level. On the contrary, the EU's social fabric is under major stress: convergence in national living standards has halted or reversed while progress in terms of poverty reduction in the last decades has been disappointing in most EU Member States. In Europe, despite high social spending and work-related welfare reforms, poverty often remains a largely intractable problem for policymakers and a persistent reality for many European citizens. In Decent Incomes for All, the authors shed new light on recent poverty trends in the European Union and the corresponding responses by European welfare states. They analyze the effect of social and fiscal policies before, during, and after the recent economic crisis and study the impact of alternative policy packages on poverty and inequality. The volume also explores how social investment and local initiatives of social innovation can contribute to tackling poverty, while recognizing that there are indeed structural constraints on the increase of the social floor and difficult trade-offs involved in reconciling work and poverty reduction. Academics and graduate students in comparative social policy, inclusion and anti-poverty policy, sociology, and public economics will find the book to be a particularly helpful resource in their work.

Based on the largest UK study of its kind ever commissioned, this fascinating book provides the most detailed national picture of poverty and social exclusion. Chapters consider a range of dimensions of disadvantage - access to local services or employment, social relations or civic participation, health and well-being. The book also explores relationships between these in the first truly multi-dimensional analysis of exclusion. Written by leading academics, this is an authoritative account of welfare outcomes achieved across the UK.

Understanding Global Poverty introduces students to the study and analysis of poverty, helping them to understand why it is pervasive across human societies, and how it can be reduced through proven policy solutions.

The book uses the capabilities and human development approach to foreground the human aspects of poverty, keeping the voices, experiences, and needs of the world’s poor central to the analysis. Starting with definitions and measurement, the book goes on to explore the causes of poverty and how poverty reduction programs and policy have responded in practice. The book also reflects on the ethics of why we should work to reduce poverty and what actions readers themselves can take. This new edition has been revised and updated throughout, featuring:

a new chapter on migration and refugees

additional international examples, including material on Mexico, Covid-19 in global perspective, and South–South development initiatives

information on careers in international development

insights into how various forms of social difference, including race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexuality relate to poverty

Fully interdisciplinary in approach, the book is also supplemented with case studies, discussion questions, and further reading suggestions in order to support learning. Perfect as an introductory textbook for students across sociology, global development, political science, anthropology, public health, and economics, Understanding Global Poverty will also be a valuable resource to policy makers and development practitioners.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Building a Framework for Understanding Poverty

Chapter 2: Development and its Debates

Chapter 3: Multidimensional Measurements of Poverty and Wellbeing

Chapter 4: Health and Poverty

Paula E. Brentlinger

Chapter 5: Geographical and Spatial Poverty

Chapter 6: Race, Class, Gender, and Poverty

Chapter 7: State Institutions, Governance, and Poverty

Chapter 8: Conflict and Poverty

Chapter 9: Migration and Poverty Reduction: balancing human security and national security

Chapter 10: Education as Poverty Reduction

Chapter 11: The Environment and Poverty Reduction

Chapter 12: Financial Services for the Poor

Conclusion: Ethics and Action: What Should You Do About Global Poverty?

Appendix: Careers in International Development

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This volume captures the innovative, theory-based, and grounded work being done by established scholars who are interrogating how teacher education can prepare teachers to work in challenging and diverse high-poverty settings. It offers articles from the US, Australia, Canada, the UK and Chile by some of the most significant scholars in the field. Internationally, research suggests that effective teachers for high poverty schools require deep theoretical understanding as well as the capacity to function across three well-substantiated areas: deep content knowledge, well-tuned pedagogical skills, and demonstrated attributes that prove their understanding and commitment to social justice. Schools in low socioeconomic communities need quality teachers most, however, they are often staffed by the least experienced and least prepared teachers. The chapters in this volume examine how pre-service teachers are taught to understand the social contexts of education. Drawing on the individual expertise of the authors, the topics covered include unpacking poverty for pre-service teachers, issues related to urban schooling as well as remote and regional area schooling.

The Encyclopedia of Islamic Civilization and Religion provides scholarly coverage of the religion, culture and history of the Islamic world, at a time when that world is undergoing considerable change and is a focus of international study and debate.

The non-Muslim world's perceptions of Islam have often tended to be dominated by unrepresentative radical extremist movements and media interpretations of events involving such movements, to the extent that many people are unaware of the depth and variety of Islamic thought. At the same time, many who have had a formal training in Islamic studies have tended to concentrate on the traditional, to the exclusion of the contemporary. The Encyclopedia of Islamic Civilization and Religion covers the full range of Islamic thought, in historical depth, but it also provides substantial coverage of contemporary trends across the Muslim world.

With well over a thousand entries on Islamic theology, history, arts, science, law and institutions, and coverage of Islam in individual countries and cities around the world, the Encyclopedia of Islamic Civilization and Religion provides an extremely rich resource for students and researchers in religious studies and Middle Eastern studies.

Entries are cross-referenced and bibliographies are provided. There is a full index. Routledge published The Qura'n: An Encyclopedia in 2005, an excellent companion to the Encyclopedia of Islamic Civilization and Religion.

"A powerful expose of Parisian haute couture" - Book of the Week, Times Higher Education Fashion is one of the most powerful industries in the world, accounting for 6% of global consumption and growing steadily. Since the 1980s and the birth of the neoliberal economy, it has emerged as the glittering face of capitalism, bringing together prestige, power and beauty and occupying a central place in media and consumer fantasies. Yet the fashion industry, which claims to offer highly desirable job opportunities, relies significantly on job instability, not just in outsourced garment production but at the very heart of its creative production of luxury. Based on an in-depth investigation involving stylists, models, designers, hairdressers, make-up artists, photographers and interns, anthropologist Giulia Mensitieri goes behind fashion's glamorous facade to explore the lived realities of working in the industry. This challenging book lays bare the working conditions of 'the most beautiful job in the world,' showing that exploitation isn't confined to sweatshops abroad or sexual harassment of models, but exists at the very heart of the powerful symbolic and economic centre of fashion.

Winner of the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing Award 2021 In 2016, a United Nations report found the UK government culpable for 'grave and systematic violations' of disabled people's rights. Since then, driven by the Tory government's obsessive drive to slash public spending whilst scapegoating the most disadvantaged in society, the situation for disabled people in Britain has continued to deteriorate. Punitive welfare regimes, the removal of essential support and services, and an ideological regime that seeks to deny disability has resulted in a situation described by the UN as a 'human catastrophe'. In this searing account, Ellen Clifford - an activist who has been at the heart of resistance against the war on disabled people - reveals precisely how and why this state of affairs has come about. From spineless political opposition to self-interested disability charities, rightwing ideological myopia to the media demonization of benefits claimants, a shocking picture emerges of how the government of the fifth-richest country in the world has been able to marginalize disabled people with near-impunity. Even so, and despite austerity biting ever deeper, the fightback has begun, with a vibrant movement of disabled activists and their supporters determined to hold the government to account - the slogan 'Nothing About Us Without Us' has never been so apt. As this book so powerfully demonstrates, if Britain is to stand any chance of being a just and equitable society, their battle is one we should all be fighting.

Evidence for the negative effects of segregation and concentrated poverty in America's cities now exists in abundance; poor and underrepresented communities in segregated urban housing markets suffer diminished outcomes in education, economic mobility, political participation, and physical and psychological health. Though many of the aggravating factors underlying this inequity have persisted or even grown worse in recent decades, the level of energy and attention devoted to them by local and national policymakers has ebbed significantly from that which inspired the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Marking 50 years since the passage of the Fair Housing and Civil Rights Acts, Facing Segregation both builds on and departs from two generations of scholarship on urban development and inequality. Authors provide historical context for patterns of segregation in the United States and present arguments for bold new policy actions ranging from local innovations to national initiatives. The volume refocuses attention on achievable solutions by providing not only an overview of this timely subject, but a roadmap forward as the twenty-first century assesses the successes and failures of the housing policies inherited from the twentieth. Rather than introducing new theories or empirical data sets describing the urban landscape, Metzger and Webber have gathered the field's first collection of prescriptions for what ought to be done.

Find out howand whylegislation has made economic rights more important than human rights Since 1996, politicians and public officials in the United States have celebrated the success of welfare reform legislation despite little, if any, evidence to support their claims. The Promise of Welfare Reform: Political Rhetoric and the Reality of Poverty in the Twenty-First Century presents articles from 23 community practitioners and researchers who challenge the reform that has turned public aid from a right to a privilege. The authors transcend conventional academic writing, offering careful and thoughtful analysis that examines the history of welfare reform, its connection to poverty, family issues, and the impact of racism on poverty and on the treatment of the poor. The Promise of Welfare Reform analyzes the consequences over the past ten years of legislative changes made to the public assistance program formerly known as Aid to Families with Dependant Children (AFDC). This powerful book examines the social, political, and economic context of welfare reform, including the elimination of poverty as a societal goal, how racial and ethic groups have been targeted, popular stereotypes about the poor and their work ethic, anti-immigrant hostility, the struggles of single mothers with children, domestic violence, and marriage as a realistic escape from poverty. The book's authors address the need for empathy and understanding to change public sentiments about welfare and poverty. Contributors to The Promise of Welfare Reform include: Elizabeth A. Segal and Keith M. Kilty, co-founding editors of the Journal of Poverty (Haworth) Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare Ann Withorn, co-editor of For Crying Out Loud: Women's Poverty in the United States Mimi Abramovitz, author of Under Attack, Fighting Back: Women and Welfare in the United States Joel Blau, co-author with Mimi Abramovitz of The Dynamics of Social Welfare Policy Margaret K. Nelson, author of The Social Economy of Single Mothers: Raising Children in Rural America Gwendolyn Mink, co-editor of Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics Kenneth J. Neubeck, co-author of Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America's Poor Lynn Fujiwara, author of Sanctioning Immigrants: Asian Immigrant Women and the Racial Politics of Welfare Reform Nancy C. Jurik, author of Bootstrap Dreams: U.S. Microenterprise Developments in an Era of Welfare Reform and much more! The Promise of Welfare Reform challenges current views on welfare reform and promotes alternative methods to alleviate poverty. It is an essential resource for sociologists, political scientists, economists, public policy and management specialists, social welfare and human services workers, and anyone else concerned about changes made to public assistance by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.

In 1970, a single mother with two children working full time at the federal minimum wage in the US received no direct cash benefits from the federal government. Today, after a period of austerity, that same mother would receive $7,572 in federal cash benefits. This money does not come from social assistance, family allowances, or other programs we traditionally see as part of the welfare state. Instead, she benefits from the earned income tax credit (EITC) and the child tax credit (CTC)-tax credits for low-income families that have become a major component of American social policy. In The Fiscalization of Social Policy, Joshua T. McCabe challenges conventional wisdom on American exceptionalism, offering the first and only comparative analysis of the politics of tax credits. Drawing comparisons between similar developments in the UK and Canada, McCabe upends much of what we know about tax credits for low-income families. Rather than attributing these changes to anti-welfare attitudes, mobilization of conservative forces, shifts toward workfare, or racial antagonism, he argues that the growing use of tax credits for social policy was a strategic adaptation to austerity. While all three countries employ the same set of tax credits, US child poverty rates remain highest, as their tax credits paradoxically exclude the poorest families. A critical examination of social policy over the last fifty years, The Fiscalization of Social Policy shows why the US government hasn't tackled poverty, even while it implements greater tax benefits for the poor.

The Road to Wigan Pier is a book in two parts: the first half is Orwell’s description of working-class life in industrial communities of the north of England, the second examines his own political views.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by journalist and author Amelia Gentleman.

The Road to Wigan Pier is an insightful and powerful account of lives lived in poverty and deprivation in a time of low wages and meagre government support. Orwell describes dismal housing (including the lodging house where he stays), harsh working conditions and the devastating effects of unemployment. And he also vividly describes the courage and dignity of the people he meets. In the second half of the book, Orwell examines his own political and social affiliations with an impressive ability to provoke and to question. He defends middle-class values whilst critiquing the failures of his own class, he advocates socialism whilst criticizing the socialist movement in England.