The arts of poverty politics

Real Change

Bibliographic Data

ID3978245
AuthorsSarah Elwood (0000-0002-1155-3490, University of Washington, corresponding author), Violet Lawson (0000-0002-7362-7176, University of Washington), Victoria Lawson (University of Washington)
Year2020
Volume21
Issue5
Pages579-601
Publication date2020-06-12
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14649365.2018.1509111
OpenAlexW2889068844
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited55

This paper explores disruptive poverty politics arising from creative activisms that challenge homelessness/impoverishment. We analyze forms and potentials of creative activisms that challenge hegemonic meanings and practices around impoverishment. Bringing together geographers’ work on creative activisms, geographies of art, and the dialectics of thinkable and unthinkable poverty politics; we analyze activism by Real Change, a Seattle economic and racial justice organization confronting the city’s shelter crisis. We argue that creative poverty activism produces performative encounters that challenge exclusionary space-making and create political connections between people experiencing poverty and those who are not. Using portraiture and public art/performance, activists disrupt normative sights, practices, and socio-spatial relations on which poverty knowledge rests in public spaces. These interventions re-script spaces of privilege produced through capitalist relations of dispossession and exclusion, and the ideological projects that undergird them. Disruptive poverty politics create encounters across socio-spatial difference that challenge privileged subjects, raise new voices, and create previously unimaginable political forms. Our analysis extends prior work on visual poverty politics that has theorized the reproduction of hegemonic poverty politics (of difference, blame, stigma, individualized causes) through representational practices. We extend relational poverty analysis into the realm of the visual, performative, and creative, revealing new sites, forms, and possibilities of disruptive poverty politics

Aesthetics · Basic needs · Culture of poverty · Hegemony · Ideology · Neoliberalism (international relations · Performative utterance · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Urban Planning and Governance