Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Poverty & Homelessness

When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through. "Ghostbread" makes real for us the shifting homes and unending hunger that shape the life of a girl growing up in poverty during the 1970s.

One of seven children brought up by a single mother, Sonja Livingston was raised in areas of western New York that remain relatively hidden from the rest of America. From an old farming town to an Indian reservation to a dead-end urban neighborhood, Livingston and her siblings follow their nonconformist mother from one ramshackle house to another on the perpetual search for something...

In a rich analysis of labor market and social welfare sectors, Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg and a team of outstanding international contributors conclude that both living-wage employment and government provision of adequate benefits and...

Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression.

Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and...

Over the last twenty years the proportion of development cooperation resources earmarked for agricultural development has dwindled to between six and seven per cent of total bi- and multilateral Official Development Assistance. This is despite the fact that eighty per cent of the world's poor live in rural agricultural areas and that the poor are disproportionately affected when political, military and natural events lead to regional or global food shortages.

Brandt and Otzen's key book fills a gap in current literature, undertaking a wide-ranging conceptual reorientation of...

When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act became law in 1996, the architects of welfare reform celebrated what they called the new "consensus" on welfare: that cash assistance should be temporary and contingent on recipients' seeking and finding employment. However, assessments about the assumptions and consequences of this radical change to the nation's social safety net were actually far more varied and disputed than the label "consensus" suggests.

By examining the varied realities and accountings of welfare restructuring, Stretched Thin...

When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act became law in 1996, the architects of welfare reform celebrated what they called the new "consensus" on welfare: that cash assistance should be temporary and contingent on recipients' seeking and finding employment. However, assessments about the assumptions and consequences of this radical change to the nation's social safety net were actually far more varied and disputed than the label "consensus" suggests.

By examining the varied realities and accountings of welfare restructuring, Stretched Thin...

When low-income city dwellers lack access to mainstream banking services, many end up turning to 'fringe banks, ' such as cheque-cashers and pawnshops, for some or all of their financial transactions. This predicament of 'financial exclusion' - faced by those underserved by conventional financial institutions - is comprehensively examined in Jerry Buckland's powerful study, Hard Choices.

The first account of the nature and causes of financial exclusion in Canada, Hard Choices thoroughly integrates economic and social data on consumer choice, bank behaviour, and...

Human rights advocacy in the West is changing. Before the turn of the century, access to goods such as food, housing, and health care while essential to human survival were deemed outside of the human rights sphere. Traditional human rights institutions focused on rights in the political arena that could be defended through legal systems.

In "Freedom from Poverty," Daniel P. L. Chong examines how today's nongovernmental organizations are modifying human rights practices and reshaping the political landscape by taking up the cause of subsistence rights. This book outlines how three types...