Global perspectives on poverty research for social justice

Abstract

The special issue of QSE includes five articles from an interdisciplinary and international group of qualitative researchers who describe their experiences conducting qualitative research with impoverished women and families. The articles focus on how qualitative approaches such as focus group interviews, participatory action research, team interviewing, video‐making, and feminist methodology can increase understandings about poverty, contribute to policy‐making, education, or activism and inspire ethical responsibilities. In this introduction, I review several global agreements aimed at fostering economic human rights to end poverty and several reports that assess how well international communities are doing to achieve economic human rights. This introduction is intended to be read as a backdrop – or perhaps a yardstick – against which to measure the conditions of poverty described in the special issue articles.

Keywords:

• poverty
• methodology
• special issue

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the reviewers who all provided thoughtful and substantive feedback on earlier drafts of all these articles and to Kimberly Rogers for her careful and conscientious editing of several of the articles in this special issue. Thanks to Norman Denzin and the organizers of the 2006 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry for having the insight to put our articles together in a session and to Carolyn Clark for asking us to contribute them to QSE.

Notes

1. I use the term, ‘the global crisis of poverty’ to indicate the burgeoning numbers of people living in poverty. As is widely reported, over 1.4 billion people live at or below the poverty line (using a poverty line of $1.25 a day), and almost half the world – over three billion people – live on less than $2.50 a day, leaving one in two children in poverty. While non‐industrialized nations have the highest levels of extreme poverty, in relative terms, affluent industrialized nations such as the UK and the USA also have high poverty rates, especially childhood poverty. Such profound economic inequality is growing rapidly, and many view the new global economy and capitalism of the late twentieth–early twenty‐first century, characterized by globalization, as one of the major causes of the global crisis of poverty. Globalization refers to the increasing interdependence among nations and their people in the context of global corporate dominance and privatization. Globalization is ‘economic (international movements of goods, financial capital, technology and trade) as well as social and political phenomena (communication, migration, environment, governance and war)’ (Amoroso 2007, 12). The role of transnational corporations and financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO); the World Bank (WB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is critical to the crisis of global poverty. While globalization promised to increase global prosperity through the flow of labor, services and goods and the integration of laborers from developing countries into the workforce to produce low‐cost goods, the reality is that the globalization policies implemented by the WTO, WB, and IMF have benefited the rich, with little consideration for the effects of these policies on the poor, resulting in ‘the widening of the gap between rich and poor and a constant increase in the number of people forced into poverty’ (Amoroso 2007, 14). As Birdsall attests, ‘global markets are inherently dis‐equalizing, making rising inequality in developing countries more rather than less likely’ (2005, 18). She explains that because markets only reward those who already have financial capital; because markets fails, taking down the poor at disproportionate rates and leaving behind debilitating debt; and because the market power of the rich fosters discrimination and exploitation against the poor in trade, migration, and intellectual property, only the interests of the rich are served, at present, by globalization (Birdsall 2005, 3). Therefore, there is little end in sight to the global crisis of poverty.

2. The feminization of poverty (Pearce 1978) is the term used to describe global patterns of poverty for women (Lister 2004). Women make up 70% of the world’s poor; women face the greatest risk of poverty over their lifetimes; female‐headed households of lone mothers and elderly women experience the highest rates of poverty; women are routinely underpaid and receive the least training and education; and women are relegated to the lowest wage, lowest status, and least secure work. Increasingly ‘Third World’ women are migrating to ‘First World’ to work as nannies, maids, and sex workers, another trend in both the feminization of poverty and the new economy of globalization (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002). According to the United Nations Human Development Report (UNHDR 1997), ‘Women are disproportionately poor and too often disempowered and burdened by the strains of productive work, the birth and care of children and other household and community responsibilities. And their lack of access to land, credit and better employment opportunities handicap their ability to fend off poverty for themselves and their families‐or to rise out of it. Women are particularly at risk in poor communities. Half a million women die each year in childbirth – at rates 10–100 times those in industrial countries.’

3. Neoliberalism, the ideology that undergirds both national policies and globalization, refers to the enactment of the supremacy of market economies over governmental policy; the decentralization of state power; the deregulation of pro‐labor and pro‐environmental supports; and of particular interest to this special issue, the dismantling of social welfare programs for the poor. Neoliberalism seeks to deregulate, privatize, and promote free enterprise, trade and entrepreneurship, lessen government responsibilities for its citizens and public institutions (Davies and Bansel 2007), cut taxes for the wealthy, and overall, ‘liberate’ corporations so that they may operate freely in the pursuit of profits.