SOCIAL SCIENCE / Poverty & Homelessness

Many people living in rural areas face hardship but the UK’s welfare system is poorly adapted to meet their needs, with the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and cutbacks exacerbating pressures. This book combines person-based and place-based approaches to tackling rural poverty.

Drawing on the largest database available on labour migration to Europe, this book examines the poverty outcomes for three generations of settler migrants spanning multiple European destinations, as compared with their returnee and stayer counterparts living in Turkey.

Telling the stories of low-income families, this book exposes the ways that pre-existing inequalities, insecurities and hardships were amplified during the pandemic in the UK and offers key policy recommendations for change.

This book synthesises the challenges of researching everyday life for families on low incomes during the COVID-19 pandemic to improve future policy and practice.

Offering a much-needed analysis of the overlooked crisis of food poverty in Ireland, this book brings together the complex picture emerging from interviews with users of food aid, explores the international landscape of food poverty and what action should be taken.

Welfare states are a major feature of many societies. This book draws on qualitative interviews with people receiving various working age welfare payments in Ireland to analyse welfare conditionality and explore stigma, social reciprocity and the notions of the deserving and undeserving poor.

Exploring why food aid exists and the deeper causes of food poverty, this book addresses neglected dimensions of traditional debates. It challenges neoliberal governmentality and shows how food charity maintains inequalities of class, race, religion and gender.

As the demand for food banks and other emergency food charities continues to rise across the continent, this is the first systematic Europe-wide study of the roots and consequences of this urgent phenomenon.

This book provides an innovative perspective to consider contemporary urban challenges through the lens of urban vacancy. The contributors develop new empirical insights that rethink ruination, urban development and political contestation over the re-use of vacant spaces in post-crisis cities across the globe.

Dan Newman and Jon Robins combine investigative journalism and academic scholarship to examine how the lives of people suffering problems with benefits, debt, family, housing and immigration are made harder by cuts to the civil justice system.

Drawing on case studies from APLE Collective groups, this book interrogates the term ‘lived experience’. It critically investigates how knowledge gained from lived experiences of poverty is integral to developing effective COVID-19 policies.

Addressing the rapidly shifting politics of the minimum wage in six English-speaking countries, Shaun Wilson analyses minimum wage policies within a political-economy narrative. Topical and poignant, this book identifies the success of living wage campaigns as central to both welfare state change and alternatives to the Basic Income.