poverty

Under the Ancien Régime, salaries were not enough to live on. Many people had to combine activities to make ends meet. Laurence Fontaine paints a vivid picture of this reality.

Around 1900, when Paris had absorbed its outlying communes and the city’s lower depths were populated by a range of shady characters, police officers oscillated between repression and social chronicle. These bulwarks against crime were also painters of poverty, who did not shy away from poetry.

Rising salaries and greater recourse to selling on credit, along with the First World War, transformed working-class consumption habits between 1880 and 1920. While covering topics ranging from deprivation to appropriation, a new book proposes to trace the “social lives of objects.”

Increased eligibility checks by social welfare agencies have led to greater severity towards low-income, economically insecure populations, as the sociologist Vincent Dubois shows thanks to a unique synthesis of different critical traditions in the social sciences.

Even though scientific data give us grounds for pessimism, philosopher Darrel Moellendorf shows that hoping for climate justice is not vain. To mobilize hope, he puts mass mobilization, technological progress and realistic utopia forward.

Poverty and great social inequality are being created at this very moment in the routines of small children. Talking, eating, socializing, taking care of oneself, keeping oneself clean, dressing, obeying, and learning: children’s sociological future is determined by the adoption of even the most trivial of habits.

Efforts to make Delhi a “global” city have gone hand in hand with the destruction of nature and the commons, as well as the relegation of the poor to the periphery. The development of this metropolis attests to the urgency to reconcile ecological justice and social justice.

Recurring typhus outbreaks among the poor in the 18^th century reinforced the belief that plebeian bodies were in a constant state of putrefaction. Adopting a longue durée approach, Rotten Bodies offers a stimulating study of medical discourse on epidemic disease in the “long” 18^th century.

Non-take-up of social welfare can take several forms and can be explained in different ways but, according to Philippe Warin, it essentially conveys an expectation of justification levelled at the public authorities.

In La Prison des Pauvres, Jacques Carré considers the history of poverty and poor relief in England between the 17^th and early 20^th centuries, focusing in particular on the complex evolution of the workhouse system. Often dreaded by paupers for its harsh discipline, it dominated English responses to poverty for several centuries, and was not abolished until after World War Two.

In the United States, tenant evictions have become a mass phenomenon. The sociologist Matthew Desmond traces the fate of eight Milwaukee families in the grips of an extraordinarily violent housing market. This outstanding study concludes with a new conceptualization of poverty.

In an unusual genre between fieldwork account and memoir, Sudhir Venkatesh proposes a sociological exploration of the informal economy of New York City. His ethnography of drug-dealers and sex-workers constitutes an occasion for him to reflect upon the limitations of “academic sociology”.

The increasing marginalisation and ghettoisation of Indian Muslims is a hotly debated but poorly understood subject. Gayer and Jaffrelot’s edited collection presents rich empirical evidence from Muslim localities in eleven Indian cities, providing key insights into the complex nature of this supposed decline.

Sociologists Jean-François Laé and Numa Murard have returned to the field where they previously conducted research on the poor and money. In contrast, their new book sheds light on the impact of processes of individualization and fragmentation on contemporary working classes.

Originally scheduled to host the next G8 summit, Chicago has been bypassed in favor of Camp David. No wonder: the “the city that works” works no more. With a terrible youth unemployment rate and municipal governance that has consistently denied its African American residents the services and jobs they deserve, Chicago has fostered despair like no other city its size. Spring will be hot.

Is expertise about poverty possible in a country where the phenomenon itself is deemed morally perverse? In a recent book, Romain Huret analyzes the intellectual network that crystallized around the “war on poverty” in the 1960s.

After several years of field work in a Chicago black ghetto, sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh gives a lively and thorough analysis of the survival strategies of its inhabitants. Halfway between solidarity and predation, the underground economy of the ghetto relies as much on money as on networks built on trust and exchange.

Lula had promised to be the president of the poor, and with the help of favourable economic conditions, he was able to reduce poverty by raising and broadening social minima. However, unable to get to grips with the roots of social imbalances, he left his successor a country still riven by inequality.

While sociological and philosophical studies of social suffering are proliferating, the psychiatrist Jean Furtos casts a clinical eye on the relations between mental health and precariousness. He presents the syndrome of self-exclusion as a pathology of precariousness, consisting of a radical reduction in psychic functioning. This lesson is not limited to psychiatry or to the study of insecurity.

A special issue of the journal Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science edited by the American sociologists David J. Harding, Michèle Lamont, and Mario L. Small examines the relations between culture and poverty. The authors return to “the culture of poverty,” a concept that became taboo in the 1970s because of its conservative and racist recuperation. Their pluralist and supple view of culture allows them to untie the knot between culture and race that feeds conservative rhetoric.

Who or what is responsible for your condition? The rich? Destiny? Yourself? The American writer William T. Vollmann posed this question to poor people in every corner of the world. Part social survey, part moralistic essay, Poor People examines how poverty is measured and represented, reaching troubling insights into the dark side of poverty – for those living it and those observing it alike.