Encountering Poverty - (Poverty, Interrupted) by Ananya Roy & Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales & Kweku Opoku-Agyemang & Clare Talwalker (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Encountering Poverty disrupts the new optimism about poverty action, challenging mainstream frameworks of global poverty. Going beyond poverty as a problem that can be solved through economic resources or technological interventions, the book focuses on the power and privilege underpinning persistent impoverishment. It explores poverty action's place in the opportunities and limits of the current moment, with its rapacious market forces and resurgent social and civil rights movements. Encountering Poverty invites students, educators, activists, and development professionals to think and act against inequality by foregrounding, not sidestepping, the long history of development and the ethical dilemmas of poverty action today."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Encountering Poverty challenges mainstream frameworks of global poverty by going beyond the claims that poverty is a problem that can be solved through economic resources or technological interventions. By focusing on the power and privilege that underpin persistent impoverishment and using tools of critical analysis and pedagogy, the authors explore the opportunities for and limits of poverty action in the current moment. Encountering Poverty invites students, educators, activists, and development professionals to think about and act against inequality by foregrounding, rather than sidestepping, the long history of development and the ethical dilemmas of poverty action today.

From the Back Cover

"Encountering Poverty is a genre-busting book, hybrid critical textbook and scholarly monograph, that pushes the reader to reflect on her or his preconceptions about, and desire to redress, global poverty. Its provocative arguments and deployment of innovative teaching tools will stimulate the most seasoned poverty scholar-educator."--Eric Sheppard, coauthor of A World of Difference: Encountering and Contesting Development

"In a neo-neoliberal era of philanthrocapitalism, globalized microfinance, and expanding entrepreneurial efforts at enlisting 'the poor' in market foster care, Encountering Poverty critically reminds us that students of poverty need to think about their own complicity in the processes that produce the suffering of poor people. But far from leading us to a place of paralysis and moralistic self-flagellation, the authors advance a more reflective and constructive approach, arguing that we can still take modest steps against massive global inequality even as we navigate its contradictions and complexities. Out of the docility and dead ends of neoliberal responsibilization, Encountering Poverty enables new and more reflexive response abilities for a world in crisis."--Matthew Sparke, author of Introducing Globalization

About the Author

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin.

Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of San Francisco.

Kweku Opoku-Agyemang is Global Poverty and Practice Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

Clare Talwalker is Lecturer in International and Area Studies and Vice Chair of Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.