Review Poverty Key Concept By Ruth Lister

Review Poverty Key Concept By Ruth Lister

A fundamental aim of this book is to allow the voices of people with direct experiences of poverty to become an important part of debates about poverty, so that their insights and opinions may in future inform attempts to define, analyze, understand and ultimately challenge poverty within Britain. It does this by presenting qualitative data drawn from a series of semi-structured interviews that were convened with a variety of groups of people who have direct experience of lining in poverty. The provides an accessible overview of contemporary discussions about poverty and related issues from the point of view of what the authors refer to as the 'four key actors' in the current poverty debate, i.e. academics, the poverty lobby, politicians and the media. Contentious issues, such as the definition, causes and potential solutions to poverty, are discussed and summarised in relation to each of these four groups; groups which remain powerful actors in shaping wider perceptions of poverty in British society in spite of them often having little direct experience of poverty.

Poverty (Key Concept) points out that those with direct experience of poverty are usually missing from political and academic debate and the book is an attempt to redress this imbalance. As Jones and Novak, have argued elsewhere 'The so called debates about poverty or the “underclass”, or welfare dependency, whether in parliament or the media are characterised by the absence of the poor themselves. Their voices, stories and perspectives scarcely feature, they appear only as objects' (p. 16). From the outset this book sets out to challenge the exclusion of poor people themselves from debates about poverty and related issues.

Given the book's authors and publisher this aim is perhaps not surprising. The objective, however, is not ...