Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South

by Ananya Roy (Editor), Emma Shaw Crane (Editor), Jamie Peck (Contribution by), Ananya Roy (Contribution by), Bill Maurer (Contribution by)

Overview

Territories of Poverty challenges the conventional North-South geographies through which poverty scholarship is organized. Staging theoretical interventions that traverse social histories of the American welfare state and critical ethnographies of international development regimes, these essays confront how poverty is constituted as a problem. In the process, the book analyzes bureaucracies of poverty, poor people’s movements, and global networks of poverty expertise, as well as more intimate modes of poverty action such as volunteerism. From post-Katrina New Orleans to Korean church missions in Africa, this book is fundamentally concerned with how poverty is territorialized.

In contrast to studies concerned with locations of poverty, Territories of Poverty engages with spatial technologies of power, be they community development and counterinsurgency during the American 1960s or the unceasing anticipation of war in Beirut. Within this territorial matrix, contributors uncover dissent, rupture, and mobilization. This book helps us understand the regulation of poverty—whether by globally circulating models of fast policy or vast webs of mobile money or philanthrocapitalist foundations—as multiple terrains of struggle for justice and social transformation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820348445
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	11/15/2015
Series:	Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series , #24
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Ananya Roy (Editor)
ANANYA ROY is a professor of urban planning and social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles where she also holds The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy and serves as inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin.

Emma Shaw Crane (Editor)
EMMA SHAW CRANE is a doctoral student in American studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She was previously a research fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Preface: Why Territories of Poverty Now? Ananya Roy Emma Shaw Crane ix

Introduction: The Aporias of Poverty Ananya Roy 1

Section 1 Programs of Government

What Kind of Problem Is Poverty? The Archeology of an Idea Michael B. Katz 39

Representation: An Archeology of Poverty for the Present Luis Flores JR. 79

Is Poverty a Global Security Threat? Akhil Gupta 84

Paying for Good Behavior: Cash Transfer Policies in the Wild Jamie Peck Nik Theodore 103

Data-Mining for Development? Poverty, Payment, and Platform Bill Maurer 126

Representation: Fast Policy in a Mobile World Christina Gossmann 144

Section 2 The Ethics of Encounter

Disaster Markets and the Poverty Factory Vincanne Adams 151

Representation: The Privatization of Everything? Rebecca Peters 173

Our Past, Your Future: Evangelical Missionaries and the Script of Prosperity Ju Hui Judy Han 176

Representation: Moving Beyond the Geography of Privilege Anh-Thi Le 195

The Duration of Inequality: Limits, Liability, and the Historical Specificity of Poverty Alyosha Goldstein 198

Funding the Other California: An Anatomy of Consensus and Consent Erica Kohl-Arenas 225

Section 3 Geographies of Penality and Risk

Class, Ethnicity, and State in the Making of Marginality: Revisiting Territories of Urban Relegation Loïc Wacquant 247

Representation: Poverty Action in Neighborhoods of Relegation Stephanie Ullrich 260

From Poor Peripheries to Sectarian Frontiers: Planning, Development, and the Spatial Production of Sectarianism in Beirut Hiba Bou Akar 264

Gray Areas: The War on Poverty at Home and Abroad Ananya Roy Stuart Schrader Emma Shaw Crane 289

Spatializing Citizenship and the Informal Public Teddy Cruz 315

Representation: The Bridge between Design and Poverty Action Somaya Abdelgany 340

Conclusion: Theory Should Ride the Bus Emma Shaw Crane 344

Contributors 355

Index 363

Editorial Reviews

This book offers a springboard that hopefully will help us move beyond the Global South label given to countries that…are considered less developed than those in the Global North.

Journal of Planning Education and Research

This book offers a springboard that hopefully will help us move beyond the Global South label given to countries that…are considered less developed than those in the Global North.

Journal of Planning Education and Research - Joseli Macedo

This innovative collection of essays seeks to enact a new way of thinking about poverty research, welfare policy, and development practice. It does so by drawing into explicit conversation two distinct traditions of research –American-based scholarship on the histories and practices of modern welfare systems, and critical ethnographies of development in the global South. . . . For any one book to do one of these three things would be commendable enough; for it to succeed across all three areas is what makes this book more than a mere collection but an essential reference point for an emerging field of inquiry into the historical geographies of problematizations.

Space and Polity

Most noteworthy in the Territories of Poverty project is the incorporation of detailed local ethnographies in a global context displaying the bewildering variety of capitalism’s many faces, be it in post-Katrina disaster relief, city planning in war-torn Beirut, securitizing of debt through microfinance in Bangladesh, or Korean evangelizing in East Africa. This is the biggest strength of the book, making it a must read in any graduate seminar on poverty.

Economic Geography - Lakshman Yapa

This innovative collection of essays seeks to enact a new way of thinking about poverty research, welfare policy, and development practice. It does so by drawing into explicit conversation two distinct traditions of research –American-based scholarship on the histories and practices of modern welfare systems, and critical ethnographies of development in the global South. . . . For any one book to do one of these three things would be commendable enough; for it to succeed across all three areas is what makes this book more than a mere collection but an essential reference point for an emerging field of inquiry into the historical geographies of problematizations.

Space and Polity - Clive Barnett

Most noteworthy in the Territories of Poverty project is the incorporation of detailed local ethnographies in a global context displaying the bewildering variety of capitalism’s many faces, be it in post-Katrina disaster relief, city planning in war-torn Beirut, securitizing of debt through microfinance in Bangladesh, or Korean evangelizing in East Africa. This is the biggest strength of the book, making it a must read in any graduate seminar on poverty.

Economic Geography