Concepts for Confronting Poverty

Earlier this month I gave a talk at the AGM for Citzen's Advice, Lewisham. 

The theme of the event was 'Confronting Poverty' and it was attended by the dedicated workers of Citizen's Advice's Lewisham branch. Other speakers, alongside myself, included MP Ellie Reeves and Policy Advisor Morgan Bestwick, from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. 

In a room full of people taking very practical steps to confront poverty, I had to question what I, as a theoretical thinker, could contribute. 

For me, the value of theory is that it develops concepts that people can use to better make sense of the world and problem solve in it. 

So my aim, I decided, would be to contribute theoretical concepts to help people confront poverty. 

I introduced three concepts I've used or developed in my own work and suggested ways they could be useful. 

The first was Ontological Insecurity. 

This is a concept I’ve found really useful , especially in my work on the housing crisis.

Housing studies scholars use the concept in a few different ways. For me, it’s most useful in describing how feelings of insecurity aren’t just linked to your current situation but are influenced by the experiences you’d had over the course of your life

When I was doing some research into Lewisham Council’s pop-up emergency housing PLACE/Ladywell I used this concept to understand resident experiences of their housing.

I was conducting interviews in the block shortly after the tragedy at Grenfell and found that the residents were all incredibly worried about the fire safety of the building. Most of them brought up fire safety as an issue even though we didn’t ask about it, and one resident even insisted on taking us outside to look at how easily a stray cigarette butt could set the building on fire.

Now, the residents didn’t have any particular reason to worry about the building’s fire safety. The building had recently won multiple architectural awards and was being widely celebrated and showcased as a success story in temporary housing provision. The residents had also been assured by the council that the building’s cladding was safe

So what made the residents feel so insecure?

Ontological insecurity helps us to understand this.

These were families who had long histories of insecure housing. Most had been made homeless through evictions from private rented accommodation and then been moved, with their young children, between a series of rat and bug infested, cold, damp and unsafe properties, often at very short notice. They had got used to living in unsafe and inappropriate conditions and to being treated like they didn’t matter.

Because of this, they’d come to expect housing insecurity. So when the tragedy at Grenfell happened they were scared. They felt like they were the kind of people this thing would happen to.

So ontological insecurity is a really important concept. It allows us to see how people might experience the same events or circumstances very differently, because of how their pasts have shaped their sense of security, or lack of it.

For example, moving between rented flats every year might be annoying but for a middle class graduate, but traumatic for a formerly homeless person. The if the graduate had a stable housing biography up to that point, those moves won’t shake their sense that they’ll have secure housing in the future. On the other hand, if the formerly homeless person has had a very unstable housing biography, then even when they’re given long term accommodation they may not be able to shake the sense that they’re not secure.

This is a useful concept in thinking about experiences of the cost of living crisis I think.  It shows us how people will experience the crisis differently, depending on their levels of ontological insecurity. It also gives us a warning about what the long term effects of this crisis could be on people’s sense of ontological security. If we can’t tackle widespread  poverty and insecurity now, we’ll be producing a generation with very high levels of ontological insecurity.

The next concept I contributed was one developed in my own work, the concept of “compensatory cultures. I explore it in my book ‘Rebranding Precarity’ which is about cultures that emerged after the 2008 financial crash.

I define compensatory cultures as cultures that are, essentially, compensatory responses to crisis but become represented as desirable ways of living.

For example – in my book I look at ‘micro living’ as a compensatory culture. Micro living is is a trend for very small houses. Micro homes are branded as trendy, and aspirational for young adults in urban areas. Micro living units are so popular in Europe that some developments have waiting lists and in London companies like ‘Pocket Living’ have become very successful and influential.

However, while micro homes are presented as aspirational, I argue that they’re compensatory. They make up for the fact that normal sized housing isn’t affordable for most people anymore.  At a time of worsening housing crisis, when ‘normal’ sized homes are too expensive for most people, stakeholders have branded micro homes as places we should want to live and thereby made a compensatory solution feel desirable.

That bit is important. Compensatory cultures don’t actually solve the problems they emerge from, they normalise those problems. Micro housing, for example, doesn’t solve the unaffordability of housing, it just makes people more likely to put up with being priced out of the ‘normal’ housing market because cramped housing has been normalised and glamorised.

I think this is a useful concept for confronting poverty because it helps us to make sense of how particular cultures can normalise precarious situations to the point where we actually forget that they even are compensatory ways of living. We forget that micro housing was a response to unaffordability, and start seeing it as a desirable trend in its own right.

We need be alert to this because, if we’re not careful, the solutions we develop in emergency situations can become our long term realities. If we let deteriorated qualities of life be normalised and glamorised then we become like the frog in the pot of boiling water in that famous fable. Things keep getting incrementally worse but we don’t really notice.

Lastly, I illuminated the concept of "Epistemic Injustice", developed by Miranda Fricker in her book of the same name. 

Epistemic Injustice refers to the injustice of how some people aren’t treated as valid knowers; their knowledge about the world is approached with bias and prejudice because of their social position or characteristics. This can manifest in sexism, racism, or any kind of bigotry, it’s also very often manifest in classism. Even having a particular accent could mean your knowledge isn’t treated as credible.

Epistemic injustice can also refer how marginalised groups are less able to make sense of their worlds because they, and people like them, haven’t been allowed into the positions of power in which concepts are created. For example, it’s only in the recent decades, since women have gained more positions of power and been allowed into discourse shaping debates, that concepts like sexual harassment have become commonplace . Now, women have more tools to make sense of their experiences, but before concepts like this had been developed and disseminated, women wouldn’t have these tools with which to interpret their lives.

This is really important in relation to tackling poverty because it reminds us that the people most impacted by poverty aren’t treated as equal knowers about what we should do about it and, because of that, they also might not have the concepts they need to make sense of their experiences. 

Not being heard as credible is a form of poverty and part of the way that poverty is reproduced.

My partner does a lot of work in the community including with young people, and one thing that he’s noticed is that people who are doing really valuable work in confronting poverty don’t have the terminology to express what they’re doing in ways that are recognised and valued by funding bodies. So funding goes to academics, or to more powerful organisations that have professional grant writers who know what you have to say, how you have to talk and what you need to look like to get recognised as a credible knower.

Because of this epistemic injustice, we’re missing out on valuable strategies and support systems that are already being deployed in communities. We need to collaborate with the people who are doing this work but not being recognised for it, to amplify their voices and support them in getting funding.  Often the opposite happens, researchers come in and take away valuable knowledge that they use to gain their own funding, rather than give it to the people already doing this important work on the ground in communities.  We need to correct this and make sure that in confronting poverty we’re building the credibility of the people who are experiencing it and tackling it day to day and making sure they are listened to.

I ended my talk on an invitaton that extends to anyone reading this article. 

What concepts do you need to help tackle the issues you're facing? 

I'm interested in how theorists can work together with action orientated groups and individuals to develop concepts that help drive progressive change. 

If you have an issue you need to make sense of, or an idea you need to articulate more clearly, then get in touch!