Full Description
Within the last few years, COVID-19, environmental disasters, the housing affordability crisis, increased homelessness, and inflation have brought poverty in the United States into sharper focus. Gaining an understanding of poverty necessitates not only an examination of macro trends and patterns, but also insights into people's everyday experiences at the micro-level. This reader brings together key topics such as food, housing, and health insecurities; spatial and environmental inequalities; employment and low wage work; social institutions; discrimination; and social change to make the study of poverty more accessible to students. It emphasizes that many kinds of people experience poverty, but also highlights how racism, sexism, homophobia, age, family structure, geographic location and other social forces can increase economic vulnerability and create barriers to economic mobility. The book opens with an introduction that defines poverty in the U.S. while also discussing the importance of looking beyond statistics and trends. Discussion questions at the end of each reading encourage critical thinking and reinforce key ideas.
Contents
Introduction: What Is Poverty, and Who is poor? Who decides?
E. Brooke Kelly, Matthew Schneider, Tracy L. Vargas, and Julia Waity
Part I: Navigating Poverty
1. Designing Spaces for Black Wellness: Transforming Science to Disrupt the Impacts of Hypersegregation and Poverty on Black Women and Youth in Chicago
Ruby Mendenhall and Meggan J. Lee
2. "My Story Is Not In Nobody's Books": Economically Marginalized Black Disabled Mothers & the Family Policing System
Siobhan M. Pokorney
3. "Healthy Stuff Is More Expensive, and I'm a Broke College Student": Food Insecurity on College Campuses
E. Brooke Kelly and Julia Waity
4. "The Thing We Can Least Do Without": Mothers Navigating Diaper Poverty
Jennifer Randles
5. Unequal Lived Experiences Among Disadvantaged Populations Exposed to Natural Disasters in the United States
Kevin Fitzpatrick and David Woodring
6. Being Choosy is a Luxury: Barriers and Successes of LGBTQ+ Adults Navigating Poverty
Dustin J. Satterfield
Part II: Poverty is Close to Home
7. The Lived Experiences of Aging in Place through Urban Decline in Cleveland
Kaitlyn B. Langendoerfer
8. "Why didn't they put that in their neighborhood?": Pigs, Profit, and Environmental Injustice in North Carolina
Matthew Jerome Schneider
9. The Impact of Social Institutions on the Lives of Precariously Housed and Unhoused People
Brenna Jones and Brian Andrew Pitman
10. Retiring in an RV, a car, or a tent in the southwestern desert: the social and spatial path to poverty
David Frati
Part III: Experiencing Poverty through Social Institutions
11. "He Gave Me Detention Because I Went to My Locker for a Pencil?!": How Race and Poverty Shape Schooling Outcomes
Suzanne Wood
12. Disposable Products, Disposable Workers: Understanding How Dollar Stores Profit from Poverty
Tracy L. Vargas
13. "A System that Keeps You Stuck": Rural Poverty and the Criminal-Legal System
Jennifer Sherman, Michelle Weston, and Jennifer Schwartz
14. Low-Income Filipina and Latina Immigrant Mothers: Stigmas and Constraints in the Public Sector Gast
Melanie Jones, Sarah M. Ovink, Dina Okamoto, and Solomon Amoatey
Part IV: Addressing Poverty
15. Mediating our Lived Experiences of Poverty: College Students Tell Silenced Stories
Jane Van Galen
16. All Together in Dignity Fourth World: Building Community to Counter Persistent Poverty
Susie Devins, Donna Haig Friedman, and E. Brooke Kelly
17. Fostering Solidarity and Action Across Communities Navigating Poverty and Homelessness: Lessons from Lived Experience-Led Advocacy
Jayne Malenfant, Alex Nelson, Pamela Spurvey, and Lucy Barretto
18. Staying Housed: The Stacked Burdens of Access and Exclusion in Eviction Prevention
Tabitha Ingle and Daniel Steven Pasciuti
