Understanding Poverty through Lived Experiences

About the Book

Within the last few years, COVID-19, environmental disasters, the housing affordability crisis, increased homelessness, and inflation have brought poverty in the United States into sharper focus. Gaining an understanding of poverty necessitates not only an examination of macro trends and patterns, but also insights into people’s everyday experiences at the micro-level. This reader brings together key topics such as food, housing, and health insecurities; spatial and environmental inequalities; employment and low wage work; social institutions; discrimination; and social change to make the study of poverty more accessible to students. It emphasizes that many kinds of people experience poverty, but also highlights how racism, sexism, homophobia, age, family structure, geographic location and other social forces can increase economic vulnerability and create barriers to economic mobility. The book opens with an introduction that defines poverty in the U.S. while also discussing the importance of looking beyond statistics and trends. Discussion questions at the end of each reading encourage critical thinking and reinforce key ideas.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: What Is Poverty, and Who is poor? Who decides?
E. Brooke Kelly, Matthew Schneider, Tracy L. Vargas, and Julia Waity

Part I: Navigating Poverty
1. Designing Spaces for Black Wellness: Transforming Science to Disrupt the Impacts of Hypersegregation and Poverty on Black Women and Youth in Chicago
Ruby Mendenhall and Meggan J. Lee

2. “My Story Is Not In Nobody’s Books”: Economically Marginalized Black Disabled Mothers & the Family Policing System
Siobhan M. Pokorney

3. “Healthy Stuff Is More Expensive, and I’m a Broke College Student”: Food Insecurity on College Campuses
E. Brooke Kelly and Julia Waity

4. “The Thing We Can Least Do Without”: Mothers Navigating Diaper Poverty
Jennifer Randles

5. Unequal Lived Experiences Among Disadvantaged Populations Exposed to Natural Disasters in the United States
Kevin Fitzpatrick and David Woodring

6. Being Choosy is a Luxury: Barriers and Successes of LGBTQ+ Adults Navigating Poverty
Dustin J. Satterfield

Part II: Poverty is Close to Home
7. The Lived Experiences of Aging in Place through Urban Decline in Cleveland
Kaitlyn B. Langendoerfer

8. “Why didn't they put that in their neighborhood?”: Pigs, Profit, and Environmental Injustice in North Carolina
Matthew Jerome Schneider

9. The Impact of Social Institutions on the Lives of Precariously Housed and Unhoused People
Brenna Jones and Brian Andrew Pitman

10. Retiring in an RV, a car, or a tent in the southwestern desert: the social and spatial path to poverty
David Frati

Part III: Experiencing Poverty through Social Institutions
11. “He Gave Me Detention Because I Went to My Locker for a Pencil?!”: How Race and Poverty Shape Schooling Outcomes
Suzanne Wood

12. Disposable Products, Disposable Workers: Understanding How Dollar Stores Profit from Poverty
Tracy L. Vargas

13. “A System that Keeps You Stuck”: Rural Poverty and the Criminal-Legal System
Jennifer Sherman, Michelle Weston, and Jennifer Schwartz

14. Low-Income Filipina and Latina Immigrant Mothers: Stigmas and Constraints in the Public Sector Gast
Melanie Jones, Sarah M. Ovink, Dina Okamoto, and Solomon Amoatey

Part IV: Addressing Poverty
15. Mediating our Lived Experiences of Poverty: College Students Tell Silenced Stories
Jane Van Galen

16. All Together in Dignity Fourth World: Building Community to Counter Persistent Poverty
Susie Devins, Donna Haig Friedman, and E. Brooke Kelly

17. Fostering Solidarity and Action Across Communities Navigating Poverty and Homelessness: Lessons from Lived Experience-Led Advocacy
Jayne Malenfant, Alex Nelson, Pamela Spurvey, and Lucy Barretto

18. Staying Housed: The Stacked Burdens of Access and Exclusion in Eviction Prevention
Tabitha Ingle and Daniel Steven Pasciuti

About the Author :

E. Brooke Kelly is professor of sociology and assistant chair of the department of sociology and criminal justice at University of North Carolina at Pembroke. She is the co-editor Food and Poverty: Food Insecurity and Food Sovereignty among America’s Poor. She is former fellow and research affiliate of the Rural Policy Research Institute's Rural Poverty Center.

Matthew Jerome Schneider is assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He is the author of Serving the Street: Volunteering as Charity, Racial Justice, and Poverty Tourism.

Tracy L. Vargas is associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. She is vice chair of the Society for Social Problems Labor Studies Division.

Julia Waity is professor and chair of the department of sociology and criminology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She is the co-editor of Food and Poverty: Food Insecurity and Food Sovereignty among America’s Poor.

Review :
This powerful collection takes care to center the voices and experiences of people living precarious economic lives and situates them within the systems that shape and constrain their actual opportunities and the choices available to them, rather than the options they are imaged to have in too much commentary on poverty. An enormously valuable collection of powerful stories that reveals over and over again what we cannot learn from quantitative data alone. This reader is ideal for upper-division classes on poverty, inequality, or social stratification. The readings provide an excellent introduction to recent scholarship in the Sociology of Poverty. More importantly, the articles are engaging and compelling because of their emphasis on the experiences of those living in poverty. This book should generate great discussion in the classroom. This book chips away at the pernicious and pervasive belief that poverty is the fault of individuals - their choice, values, behaviors, mistakes. As a compilation of research that brings the realities of poverty to light, the book documents the structural roots of poverty and reveals just how easy it is to get stuck in a cascade of material hardship. Perfect for undergraduate courses on poverty, inequality and social problems, the book will foster within readers greater empathy, sharper critical reflection, and deeper understanding. Each chapter brings readers into a different facet of life in poverty - from diaper need to food insecurity to rural imprisonment - and each chapter concludes with a set of well-crafted discussion questions, making this book a great choice for course adoption. Understanding Poverty through Lived Experiences is a powerful and timely volume that brings the realities of poverty into sharp focus. Moving beyond abstraction, it weaves together voices and analyses that reveal how inequality is produced and sustained across schools, neighborhoods, labor markets, and social institutions. Both accessible and deeply insightful, this book is essential reading for students and scholars seeking to understand poverty in all its human complexity.