Poverty Online Course Module 1: Introduction to Betting on Famine by Prof Jean Ziegler

“The destruction, every year, of tens of millions of men, women, and children from hunger is the greatest scandal of our era. Every five seconds, a child under the age of ten dies of hunger – on a planet abounding in wealth and rich in natural resources. In its current state, the global agricultural system would in face, without any difficulty, be capable of feeding 12 billion people, or twice the world’s current population. Hunger is thus in no way inevitable. Every child who starves to death is murdered.” Read more…

The Tragedy of the Commons People: A Marmot Overview

This presentation explores working class in terms of permissions and allowances. Making an analysis of classifications as forms of empirical topography rather than cultural insignia, this examines notions of how intersectionality and verticality play out in terms of recognition, valuation and dehumanisation. Read more…

The Missing Story of Mary Burns and Fred: Silences in the Story of History

Coming shortly…. This is a placeholder for an article which is to be published soon as an appendix to a peer reviewed paper submitted to the PRISM Journal and presented at the 2020 Working Class Academics conference. The paper submitted to PRISM is called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons People: A Marmot Overview’ and lays out a perspective on how ‘workingclassness’ can be interpreted as being on a spectrum of having to perform to gain access to sufficiency, the mechanics of a hierarchy of permissions and allowances, the psychology of exclusion, and the effects on life expectancy and health as drawn from Michael Marmot‘s work. Read more…

Recollections of John Pounds: Feeding the Sick and Poor by Reverend Henry Hawkes

The winter of 1837-8 was unusually severe. The streets were covered with ice for weeks together. Birds of strong wing, accustomed to fly high, and not commonly seen in the neighbourhood of towns, were now seen flying low along the streets, in search for food. The hardships and sufferings of the poor were extreme. Great efforts were made to relieve them. Read more…

Action Research: The Outcomes Star and Developing Novel Methodologies

What follows is the start of my action research project deconstructing of the Outcomes Star, a metric bureaucracy instated in various support-need junctures which the person receiving support has to fill in and go over with the person who is giving the support. This is one of various types of bureaucracy which people have to face (both citizen and worker). Read more…

Impoverishment, Downsourcing and Buying Your Way Out

In this article I am laying out a term I have coined – ‘downsourcing’ – as a kind of impoverishment externalised by classes with sufficient finance to buy themselves out of trouble. I will be trying to drill down to the fine detail some of the what’s, how’s and why’s of ‘poverty’ are recreated in day to day behaviours and actions in the UK today. For such an affluent nation brimming with endless numbers of charities, for me, significant questions are not being asked and significant acknowledgments are being avoided. This is part of an extended project focusing on how impoverished circumstances are created and recreated. Read more…

Education, Utopia, Necessity, and Existential Poverty

This paper explores a perspective emerging from a community education project called Ragged University. The philosophical underpinnings of the project came as a response to necessity brought about by the existential poverty being created as a result of the process of enclosing the commons of the intellect. Read more…

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