Does ‘real’ poverty still exist in Britain? How do people differentiate between the supposed ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor? Is there a culture of worklessness passed down from generation to generation? Bringing together historical and contemporary material, Poverty Propaganda: Exploring the myths sheds new light on how poverty is understood in contemporary Britain. The book debunks many popular myths and misconceptions about poverty and its prevalence, causes and consequences. In particular, it highlights the role of ‘poverty propaganda’ in sustaining class divides in perpetuating poverty and disadvantage in contemporary Britain.

Poverty remains one of the most urgent issues of our time. In this fully updated edition of her important and widely acclaimed intervention on the topic, Ruth Lister introduces readers to the meaning and experience of poverty in the contemporary world. The book opens with a lucid discussion of current debates around the definition and measurement of poverty in industrialized societies, before embarking on a multifaceted exploration of its varied interpretations. Drawing on thinking in the field of international development and real-life accounts, the book emphasizes key aspects of poverty such as powerlessness, lack of voice, insecurity, loss of dignity and respect. Ruth Lister embraces the relational, cultural, symbolic as well as material dimensions of poverty, and makes important links between poverty and other concepts such as capabilities, agency, human rights and citizenship. She concludes by making the case for reframing the politics of poverty as a claim for redistribution and recognition. The result is a rich and insightful analysis, which deepens and broadens our understanding of poverty today. It will be essential reading for all students in the social sciences, as well as researchers, activists and policymakers.

What does it mean to be poor in Britain and America? For decades the primary narrative about poverty in both countries is that it has been caused by personal flaws or ‘bad life decisions’ rather than policy choices or economic inequality. This misleading account has become deeply embedded in the public consciousness with serious ramifications for how financially vulnerable people are seen, spoken about and treated. Drawing on a two-year multi-platform initiative, this book by award-winning journalist and author Mary O’Hara, asks how we can overturn this portrayal once and for all. Crucially, she turns to the real experts to try to find answers – the people who live it.

This textbook explains the basic principles of sociology and how a sociological understanding is vital for understanding how ideas about education and schooling have developed over time and how these issues directly affect our own lives today. This fully updated second edition will encourage students to think critically about hotly contested debates in education and what has influenced different perspectives on these issues. New to this edition: · Two new chapters on early approaches to sociological research and social class and social mobility · A new case study feature throughout the book · Enhanced coverage of recent education policy, child poverty, political extremism and the politics of independent and grammar schools. This is essential reading for students on undergraduate Education Studies degrees, and for sociology courses covering educational issues.

This interdisciplinary collection examines the role that alcohol, tobacco and other drugs have played in framing certain groups and spaces as ‘dangerous’ and in influencing the nature of formal responses to the perceived threat. Taking a historical and cross-national perspective, it explores how such groups and spaces are defined and bounded as well as the processes by which they come to be seen as ‘risky’. It discusses how issues of perceived danger highlight questions of control and the management of behaviours, people and environments, and it pays attention to the way in which sanctions and regulations have been implemented in a variety of often inconsistent ways that frequently impact differently on different sections of the population. Bringing together a range of case studies drawn from different countries and across different periods of time, the chapters collected here illustrate issues of marginalisation, stigmatisation, human rights and social expectations. It is of interest to a diverse audience of historians, philosophers, human geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and criminologists interested in substance use and misuse, deviance, risk and power among other topics.

"In wealthy nations such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, issues of poverty and homelessness have often been displaced or sidelined by the accelerating number of studies on income inequality and wealth disparity. In Poverty and Austerity amid Prosperity, Gregg M. Olsen refocuses our attention on rising levels of poverty and homelessness, suggesting what we can do to address these issues. Highlighting the important differences between Canada, the UK, and the US, this volume explores the broad and narrow ways that poverty and homelessness have been conceptualized, and how this has shaped the way they are defined, measured, and addressed in each country. After a careful examination of poverty in these three countries, the volume draws comparisons with European nations that have been more successful in keeping issues relating to poverty under control. Olsen presents and critically contrasts the two main theoretical traditions, individual versus society, that have emerged to explain poverty and homelessness. Olsen argues that societal approaches to the study of poverty are better equipped to explain the developments unfolding across these nations, and that the eradication of poverty will only happen when the socio-economic system has been seriously overhauled and founded upon economic democracy."--

This book develops a new sociology of the intergenerational and longitudinal dynamics of men’s family participation in relation to their trajectories through poverty. By addressing the ostensible absence of men from low-income families in existing literature and policy, the authors interrogate the interconnectedness of poverty, family, and place while paying explicit attention to the trajectories of men through and across low-income families and localities. Through qualitative secondary analysis of four linked datasets from research within low-income families over a twenty-year period, Hughes and Tarrant argue that there is much to be gained from examining both men’s accounts of family and poverty across the lifecourse and the accounts of men experiencing family poverty. In so doing, they develop a new theoretical family lifecourse framework that accounts for the dynamic and place-based character of poverty and its implication for families. Thus, the book foregrounds the development of a more comprehensive sociology of family poverty.

PROJECT–H is about the Free World and the kind of projects that really do on behind the scenes. The reader will gain many things. The story is based on 'prepaid research and development programs. Byron R. Bowen has many years of experience working with project engineers and scientists on advance electronic systems. He has also taught English and Science and some mathematics. Although the people are fictional characters, the reader may discover many new things. Robert Farlan, an auditor for the company is sent to a high mountain region to investigate rumors about a secret world. He enters another world where he encounters a small civilization. Though he only audits government projects, the people seem different than most systems personnel. He learns they were at one time a top secret government project. Due to a paper glitch of some kind the project had been abandoned. Project funding suddenly terminated left them without an money and supplies needed to operate their homes, projects and services. in some ways and returns to his own world. The Company began the mission from rumor. It was past two thirty a.m., when the helicopter made an approach for a landing on the high mountain plateau. The June sun lay just below the lighted horizon on the mountain peaks to the east. The new moon had grown pale and white in the light of early dawn. When they came closer, I could see that she had green eyes that sparkled unusually bright. “I made the recording for the security system at your suggestion, father,” she replied quickly. For some reason I felt relief knowing the older gentleman was her father. He said. “Are you interested in the whole story?” “Well, yes, I answered. I am interested in the unique aspects of the project.” That is what the captain wanted, the whole story, if there was a story. I had a duty to perform and I owed my loyalty to the company. It was not my place to make any judgments. I intuitively felt certain the project people were not subversive. “Project-H is unique of all government projects. Research involves electricity of every kind and no other kind of energy.” The project leader said.

Scoundrels and Shirkers examines the deep relationship between capitalism and poverty in England since the 12th century. It exposes the dynamics of capitalism, from its origins in the long transition from feudalism to its current crisis under neoliberal capitalism, in producing poverty. The book, unique in the historical breadth of its focus, shows conclusively that poverty is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. In the search for profits and control of society’s economic surplus, capitalism expands, adapts and innovates, producing not only commodities and wealth but also, and necessarily, poverty. With the partial but important exception of the 1945–51 period, and to a lesser extent the time between 1906 and 1914, there has never been a serious attempt to solve poverty. Efforts have always been to manage and control the poor to prevent them from starving or rebelling; to punish and blame them for being poor; and to force them into poverty-level jobs. Any real solution would require the logic of capitalism to be deeply disrupted. While possible in theory, such a change will require massive social movements.

The Unacknowledged Disaster concerns two huge and closely-tied but widely ignored problems that plague the U.S. On the one hand, America tolerates a massive amount of youth poverty, while on the other, youth poverty is the major social factor generating failure in the country’s education. (More than one-fifth of American youths are now impoverished–a poverty rate far worse than those for American adults or the elderly and more than twice the size of youth poverty rates in other advanced nations–and poverty generates most educational failure effects in the U.S. often assigned to such factors as student race, broken homes, and the supposed failures of teachers and school administrators.) These problems have been studied extensively, and the tragedies they create are well known to scholars, but they are often misrepresented, misunderstood, or unacknowledged by far-right advocates, media figures, policy makers, and those concerned with serious problems that now beset the United States. This book reviews evidence concerning these problems and their dire effects, discusses ineffective or tragic outcomes that result when these problems are ignored, assesses why these problems are so often unacknowledged in the United States, and sets forth clear, evidence-based policies that can reduce the disastrous scope of American youth poverty and its destructive effects in education.