In this short article, we call for policy makers, activists and academics to take account of food aesthetics of economically and racially marginalised people – especially women – when understanding and intervening in food distribution. Although it may seem that aesthetics and poverty are mutually exclusive, and somewhat provocative to suggest that food aesthetics, when understood more expansively, aesthetics is an important aspect of domestic food work, as our findings from our research with British Bangladeshi women from Tower Hamlets on low incomes and responsible for social reproductive labour in their families and communities attest. We draw inspiration from feminist philosophy of food and taste, and everyday domestic aesthetics. Reflecting on our data, we combine these philosophies with Krishnendu Ray’s critique of food sociologists who imagine that people on low incomes lack a sense of beauty because their lives are dominated by their life of suffering. To conclude, we propose that food aesthetics should become part of the politics of food distribution and rights.
Media coverage plays an important role in generating knowledge about and shaping understandings of homelessness. Although families make up about 35% of all those without housing in the United States, they remain relatively invisible in the media. We examine the amount of coverage and content of representations of homeless families in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times in 2017 and 2022. Families receive little media coverage in comparison to single, homeless adults, especially men. When newspapers do address unhoused families, they mainly do so without reference to the race, gender, or sexuality of homeless families. As a result of limited and trivial coverage, it is difficult to find articles that provide extended discussion of family homelessness or explain the multi-layered structural factors that cause families to lose housing.
In this article, we respond to a critical review of Covering all the Basics: Reforms for a More Just Society, published in this journal (Smith-Carrier, T., Forget, E., Power, E. and Halpenny, C. [2024] ‘Covering all the [welfare] basics’: a critical policy study of the Expert Panel on Basic Income report in British Columbia, Canada, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, XX(XX): 1–27, DOI: 10.1332/17598273Y2024D000000016), by providing what we view as a more accurate description of the findings and arguments in that report. The result, we hope, is an alternative depiction of how a basic income would relate to the search for a more just society.
The Cuban population is going through a process of demographic change and accelerated ageing which, together with a difficult economic situation, places older adults in a particularly complex situation, especially in those vulnerable communities. The study analyses the economic situation, sources of income, and coverage of basic needs of a sample of people over 60 years of age (n = 325) from a vulnerable community in the city of Santiago de Cuba. The community had an inadequate urban structure and a high amount of solid and liquid waste in the streets, and its inhabitants had limited economic resources. A structured interview was used for data collection. The results show that the persons over 60 years of age who were interviewed had extremely low incomes, despite resorting to multiple strategies to try to obtain economic resources. A high percentage reported a lack of income to meet their needs, including such essential needs as food, housing, and health care. In relation to these issues, women and people over 75 years of age were particularly vulnerable. Decision makers need to take into account the needs of older adults in vulnerable communities when implementing social care policies and strategies, paying special attention to the most vulnerable groups such as women or older people.
In this first UK study of ‘Workers using foodbanks’, 65 per cent of research participants, including 76 per cent of those of working age, identified poor-quality employment as the root cause of their food insecurity. This primary problem of the deficient quality of jobs was characterised by insecure work, low wages, and excessive mental stress. Data revealed an environment in which workers are required to claim benefits because available employment cannot sustain their needs. A contemporary generation of ‘in-and-out-of-work[ers]’ are food insecure because of a secondary problem of inadequate welfare support. Post-pandemic welfare laws are interacting with ineffective employment rights protection to scaffold a low-wage labour market in which jobs are stripped of qualities that meet workers’ basic needs. There is an urgent need to respond to the UKs record high incidence of food insecurity by improving the quality of available employment so that all jobs deliver adequate income, security of working arrangements, and support for good mental and physical health. ‘Workers using foodbanks’ is an aphorism that captures a contemporary reality in which the risk of food insecurity is embedded in contractual arrangements for work that are forged at the nexus of welfare and employment laws.
Usually conditional cash transfer programmes (CCTs) are interpreted as passive policies dealing with income maintenance and needs fulfilment. However, recently some of the literature has suggested a more active role for them. The aim of this article is to investigate the inclusive role of human rights-based CCTs using the Bolsa Família (BF) policy as a case study. Specifically, I assess the effect of this programme on human development using a systematic review of results from natural, quasi-experimental, counterfactual and longitudinal analyses. The main findings suggest some positive effect of the BF on human development. However, the BF programme should be more integrated with the education and the health system to ameliorate the advancement of human rights. For example, when social workers visit recipient families they should enrol children in the education system. Also, healthcare teams should visit recipient families more frequently and provide healthcare advice as well as healthcare support to ameliorate the nutritional and health status of children.
This article examines the practice of fraudulent informal loans given to vulnerable groups in Mexico, and connects these malpractices to the structural (re)production of poverty. The scams resolve around fake credit companies offering loans to people in need on the condition that they pay a deposit, after which contact is broken. After locating scams within broader discussions on vulnerability, poverty and credit, an empirical study is presented based on 35 interviews with victims. Results are presented regarding the reasons why people fall in these traps, how they are cause and consequence of vulnerability, and the difficulties of prosecution. The conclusions reflect on the role of such traps within the production of poverty, the relative invisibility of these crimes, and the topic of legal protection and prosecution.
As I argued in the preceding chapter, it makes sense, in the context of an incorporated comparison concerned with processes of deindustrialization, to zoom in on Western Europe and examine different national cases that reflect the variegation of global capitalism. Britain bears hallmarks of a liberal market economy. Accordingly, the institutions characterizing the British political economy reflect the assumption that the market mechanism allocates resources efficiently: the regulation of the financial sector is comparably ‘light’ (see Gallas, 2010; Tooze, 2018); for-profit, private sector companies and public–private partnerships play an important role in delivering public services (Flinders, 2005; Gallas, 2016: 241–2); and economic inequality is higher than in the other Western European countries. Indeed, economic liberalism has deep roots in the country. Paired with colonialism and imperialism, it was a prominent feature of government policy in the age of the British empire in the 19th century. Back then, leading politicians had been promoting the erection of a ‘world market’ based on ‘free trade’ (Arrighi, 1994: 47–58; Gallas, 2008: 283; 2016: 76, 134–5). After the Second World War, economic and social policy shifted. Under the postwar settlement between capital and labour, full employment and benefits were traded for union acquiescence. A welfare state was erected, and successive governments started to experiment with Keynesianism and corporatism. But in reaction to a deep crisis of the British political economy and a wave of rank-and-file militancy on the side of organized labour, leading politicians re-embraced, from the mid-1970s onwards, ‘free market’ ideas.
