Abstract
The publication of the second edition of Ruth Lister’s seminal work, Poverty, could hardly be more timely. First published in 2004, the book has been a reference point for debates on poverty – its definition, measurement, lived experience and the power of discourse to Other, stigmatise and maintain income and power inequalities – for almost two decades. The second edition, published in early 2021, arrives amid the economic and social fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which unemployment has risen sharply while poverty and food bank use have spiralled. The British political and policy context is markedly different to the relatively optimistic environment in which the first edition was published, a time of increased public spending and falling poverty among pensioners and children (Joyce and Sibieta, 2013). The second edition comes on the back of over a decade of ‘welfare reform’ in the UK, pioneered by Conservative-led administrations since 2010. The period since 2010 has seen the introduction of multiple policies designed to decrease the value and accessibility of social security; the benefit cap and two-child limit have reduced sharply the income from social security for larger families, while Universal Credit has been associated with indicators of hardship such as food insecurity.
A member of the House of Lords since 2011, Lister is well placed to observe and critique the political drivers and dynamics of poverty. The second edition, Lister writes, tries to ‘do justice to the extensive and rich literature on poverty that has been published since I wrote the first edition’ (p. xi). Like the first edition, the book is primarily a detailed review of literature on the concept of poverty. Lister situates definitions of poverty within a broader social scientific literature, emphasising structuralist and individualistic perspectives which implicitly underpin definitions of poverty, as well as the importance of understanding definitions of poverty as part of the political use to which they are put. The operationalisation of definitions in Chapter 2 gives a ‘sense of the increasingly sophisticated literature on measurement’ (p. 11), while a focus on intersectionality in Chapter 3 brilliantly details how poverty is both gendered and racialised, how disability and age interact with poverty and how poverty is experienced at different levels – individual, household and the wider community. An omission in the first edition, Lister explains how whiteness, like blackness, is ‘a racializing discourse’ (Tyler, 2013, quoted on p. 75); whiteness intersects with class in the form of labels such as ‘white trash’ or ‘chav’ to represent a stigmatised, unacceptable identity. The racialisation and individualisation of both white and black groups living in poverty obscures structural inequalities as the source of the difficulties faced by ethnic minority and white working-class populations.
Informed by both her own interests and numerous publications since the first edition in 2004, Lister significantly expands the inclusion of literature on participatory approaches to poverty research; psycho-social, relational and symbolic dimensions of poverty; and insecurity. The chapters on the representation of the ‘poor’, Othering, agency, human rights and citizenship are particularly powerful. Building on the first edition, Lister details the profoundly negative effects of language on poverty, heavily informed by historical and contemporary discourses, which shape how those in poverty are perceived by both wider society and themselves. Such a discussion could potentially serve to categorise ‘the poor’ as passive innocent ‘victims’ or problematic ‘welfare dependants’, as some literature on poverty can do. Chapter 5, however, drawing upon contemporary sociological and international development theory, alongside poverty research, firmly resists this tendency; it details how people in poverty are actors in their own lives, exercising agency and, with it, resistance. Challenging passive portrayals of ‘the poor’, Lister argues for the ‘importance to the conceptualization of poverty of agency itself – from the everyday level of “getting by” to the more strategic level of “getting organized”’ (p. 175). Similarly, in Chapter 6, on human rights and citizenship, Lister highlights a key advantage of a human rights approach to poverty: framing – a focus on universal human rights constructs people in poverty as active and ‘legitimate claimants of entitlements’ rather than ‘beneficiaries of government largesse’ (p. 182).
Lister is a champion of participatory approaches to research and policy making; the final chapter encourages a greater emphasis on participatory methods but crucially as part of a broader approach embedding anti-poverty policy within wider policy debates. Lister closes the book with an argument for a politics of not only redistribution but also recognition and respect of those in poverty, illustrating her particular combination of professional expertise, empathy and morality. The first edition of Poverty has been a, if not the, key text on poverty since 2004; this new edition is likely to replace the first on the bookshelves of scholars, policy makers and practitioners concerned about poverty.
