Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Poverty & Homelessness

As the only male head of state to address the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, Alberto Fujimori projected an image as a promoter of progressive policies to improve the condition of women, especially the poor, in society. And indeed, during his tenure, the Peruvian government did pursue such policies in several areas, including poverty relief, population control, and domestic violence. In Intersecting Inequalities, Jelke Boesten uses these policies as case studies, examining the relationship between gender/race/class/ethnic divisions and the state in its...

Culture has returned to the poverty research agenda.

Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty, at times even explaining the behavior of low-income populations in reference to cultural factors. Unlike their predecessors, contemporary researchers rarely claim that culture will sustain itself for multiple generations regardless of structural changes, and they almost never use the term pathology, which implied in an earlier era that people would cease to be poor if they changed...

An unexpected detour can change the course of our lives forever, and, for white American anthropologist Margaret Willson, a stopover in Brazil led to immersion in a kaleidoscopic world of street urchins, capoeiristas, drug dealers, and wise teachers. She and African Brazilian activist Rita Conceicao joined forces to break the cycles of poverty and violence around them by pledging local residents they would create a top-quality educational program for girls. From 1991 to the graduation of Bahia Street's first college-bound graduate in 2005, Willson and Conceicao 's adventure took them to...

Of the countless people around the world enduring deprivation and tremendous suffering from poverty and malnutrition, hundreds of millions are children. Butresearch on poverty and development has only relatively recently begun to focus on this aspect of global poverty.Featuring contributions from leading researchers, this book examines how child poverty and well-being are conceptualized, defined, and measured and presents regional and national studies of child poverty from around the world."Global Child Poverty and Well-Being"is an urgent call to arms for researchers and policymakers to...

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...

This far-reaching study of maternal societies in post-revolutionary France focuses on the philanthropic work of the Society for Maternal Charity, the most prominent organization of its kind. Administered by middle-class and elite women and financed by powerful families and the government, the Society offered support to poor mothers, helping them to nurse and encouraging them not to abandon their children. In Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood, Christine Adams traces the Society's key role in shaping notions of maternity and in shifting the care of poor families from the hands of charitable...

More Than Bread examines life in the dining room of the Tabernacle Soup Kitchen, located in Middle City in a New England state. What happens when one hundred guests, which include single mothers, drug addicts, alcoholics, the mentally ill, and the chronically unemployed, representing diverse age groups and ethnicities, come together in the dining room for several hours each day? Irene Glasser challenges the popular assumption that soup kitchens function primarily to provide food for the hungry by refocusing our attention on the social aspects of the dining room. The soup kitchen...