Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The paper reviews psychoanalytic scholarship on the themes of poverty and deprivation available on the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publications (PEP-web). The paper evaluates select definitions and explanations of poverty as illustrated in the scientific papers published in the PEP-web from 1933 to 2003 (covering 70 years) and finds that psychoanalytic scholarship has very little to say directly about poverty or the poor. Inspite of references to the poverty of dreams, poverty of affect, poverty of intellect there is in reality little engagement with ‘real’ poverty. The reasons and effects of this neglect are firstly traced to the attitudinal biases and beliefs held by the psychoanalytic authors which prevents them from acknowledging poor and deprived as worthy of their attention. The review also points out to confusions, oversimplifications and neglect shown in the use of poverty and its related terminologies. Absence of fuller appreciation of poverty is then traced to some philosophical quandaries in psychoanalytic epistemology such as the place of real vs psychic, culture vs individual, and need vs value to cite a few. A third reason for this neglect can be attributed to the uneven spread, reception and development of psychoanalysis in different geo-political locations along with the continuous neglect in addressing cultural differences arising from various social contexts and realities. Hence providing a possible explanation as to why social inequalities and adversities remain unaddressed in this literature.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Across the social sciences, the typical study of poverty assesses the individual characteristics that explain why people are poor. In recent years, sociologists have called on inequality researchers to contextualize socio-economic attainment within the institutions and social relations that generate inequality. Our study analyzes how the political context of affluent democracies, embodied by the welfare state and collective political actors, shapes poverty. Specifically, we conduct a multi-level analysis of working-aged adult poverty across 18 affluent Western democracies. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (N=336,066), we examine the individual-level characteristics of working-aged adults along with country-level data on the political context. While several individual characteristics have expected associations with poverty, some commonly studied characteristics fail to have robust significant effects across the affluent democracies. Our index of welfare generosity has a negative effect that is larger than the effects of almost all individual characteristics. The effect is also significant net of individual characteristics, economic performance and structural context. For a standard deviation increase in welfare generosity, the odds of poverty decline by more than 60 percent. A working-aged adult in the U.S. (the least generous welfare state) is about 180% more likely to be poor than a person with identical characteristics in Denmark (the most generous). The welfare state also reduces the impact of low education and the number of children. We show that collective political actors, especially Leftist parties in government, reduce the likelihood of poverty. Most of the effect of collective political actors channels through the welfare state, though some the effect combines with the welfare state. Ultimately, poverty is determined as much, if not more, by the political context in which an individual lives as the characteristics of that individual.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper traces the role of the prevailing discourse of autonomy that runs through several influential analyses of poverty in the post-civil rights movement era (Moynihan, Murray, and Mead). By conflating autonomy with independence, the authors of these analyses devalue or misplace the role of social relationships in promoting autonomy. If, as the paper contends, autonomy is critical to citizenship in the liberal state, these analyses of poverty not only serve to demarcate the “dependent” as necessarily non-autonomous, they also fail to suggest appropriate mechanisms to foster the development of such autonomy where it is lacking (and where some are therefore denied full citizenship rights). The failure of these analyses to consider what autonomy, and therefore citizenship, mean in the context of dependence, leads to an incomplete analysis of poverty and, subsequently, to distorted anti-poverty policy proposals.

Publication Type: Poster
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The main aim of this research has been to study the relationships among causal attributions for poverty, implicit theories on development and the perceived efficacy of different strategies against poverty. One hundred and sixty-five students from the University of Granada voluntarily and anonymously answered a questionnaire including: (a) CTWPQ Scale (Harper et al., 1990) measuring causal attributions for poverty; (b) three definitions corresponding to three different conceptions of development and (c) a scale composed of sentences representing three groups of strategies against poverty. Participants considered international economy rules the main cause of Global South countries’ poverty, and blaming the poor the least important factor. They also preferred the conception of Sustainable Human Development instead of the definition of development as economic growth or post-development conceptions. Finally, development cooperation projects were assessed as better poverty reduction strategies than social mobilization or assistance aid. Relationships among these variables were also found. These results underscore the convenience of knowing implicit theories people have on development; these conceptions might influence the acceptance or rejection of different actions against poverty and modulate causal attributions for poverty.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The proposed paper is part of dissertation research on a policy model designed to improve educational outcomes and thus reduce intergenerational poverty. Known as conditional cash transfer programs in development literature, they were first popularized in Brazil and Mexico and have since been replicated in many other Latin American countries, with varying degrees of longevity. Despite the apparent (empirical) success in most countries, the fates of the programs have been mixed.
The current paper is a comparison of the Red de Proteccion Social program in Nicaragua, and the Familias en Accion program in Colombia. Despite similar success, the program in Nicaragua has been disbanded under the current administration, while Colombia’s has flourished. The paper is a comparative analysis of the interaction between policy and historical-political context in the adoption of these educational policy reforms, a major conclusion being that the ideology governing educational policy must be sufficiently in line with that of political authority, or no amount of technical success will ensure its survival.
Although more policy-oriented than “practice-oriented”, the paper’s focus on best practice diffusion fits precisely the theme of the CIES conference and addresses similar contextual concerns, as well as the interplay between international intervention and local adaptation.