Browsing by Subject "Poverty"

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusions for practice

Through an analysis of contemporary films, novels, comics, and other popular texts, my dissertation argues that upward class mobility, as the progress narrative through which the American Dream has solidified itself in literary and cultural convention, is based on a false logic of "self-made" individualism. The texts I examine tell a new kind of mobility story: one that openly acknowledges the working-class community interdependence underpinning individuals' ability to rise to their accomplishments. My work spotlights distinctly un-rich communities invested in the welfare of their most vulnerable citizens. It also features goal-oriented individuals who recognize the personal impact of this investment as well as the dignity of poor and working-class people from "heartland" Texas to Lower East Side Manhattan. American-exceptionalist stories no longer ring true with popular audiences faced with diminishing access to economic resources and truly democratic political representation. The growing wealth gap between the corporate elite and everyone else has resulted in a healthy mass skepticism toward simplistic narratives of hard work guaranteeing the comforts of a middle-clas life. The archive I have identified displays a fundamental commitment to the social contract that is perhaps the greatest of U.S. working-class values, offering a hopeful vision of collective accountability to readers and viewers struggling to avoid immobilizing debt, foreclosure, and the unemployment line.

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Study registration

Most research on the effects of economic hardship on children and parents has only considered the effects of income poverty, while ignoring the roles of two other dimensions of economic hardship - subjective financial stress and material deprivation. In this dissertation, I fill that gap in the literature by examining the effects of these underexamined dimensions of economic hardship on children's social-emotional outcomes from an international perspective. I also expand on the extant literature by examining the effects of economic hardship on parenting at the community, rather than the family, level. Together, the three chapters of this dissertation add a more nuanced and global perspective to a growing body of literature on the multiple dimensions of economic hardship and their impacts on children and parents.

The first chapter examines the multiple possible manifestations of economic hardship at the family level and their associations with children's social-emotional outcomes. Using data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a nationally representative longitudinal study of children born between 2000 and 2001 in the United Kingdom, I find that half of the families who experienced economic hardship were not income poor, but nevertheless experienced material deprivation, subjective financial stress, or both. Moreover, all manifestations of economic hardship, including those without income poverty, were associated with higher levels of behavior problems for children. I interpret these findings to indicate that income poverty is a necessary but insufficient measure of economic hardship and that future research on the effects of economic hardship should consider all of the possible manifestations of economic hardship.

The second chapter more deeply investigates the association between material deprivation and children's social-emotional outcomes holding income constant. I use data from the Parenting Across Cultures Project to identify whether the association between material deprivation and children's behavior problems found in the first paper is also observable among families in nine diverse countries in Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. I find that even when income remained stable, parents' perceived material deprivation was associated with children's externalizing behavior problems. I also find that parents' disciplinary practices explain a small but significant share of the association between parents' perceived material deprivation and children's behavior problems. There were no differences in these associations between mothers and fathers or between high- and low- and middle-income countries. These results provide further evidence that material deprivation influences children's social-emotional outcomes at any income level and suggest that this association is significant in diverse political, cultural, and economic contexts.

The third chapter examines the effect of economic hardship on parenting behavior at the community, rather than family, level. Using longitudinal state-level US administrative data on mass layoffs and child maltreatment investigations, this chapter tests whether economic shocks at the state level are associated with community-wide increases in child maltreatment. I show that job losses are associated with a significant increase in investigations for physical abuse, but not in the overall rate of investigations. Moreover, job losses also predict an increase in the share of reports that was substantiated. These findings underscore the need to consider economic hardship at the community level in addition to the family level when studying economic disparities in children's outcomes and experiences.

This dissertation draws on American literature from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression to fashion a theory of abandonment, a term that designates both a material reality and a conceptual framework; abandonment names what remains unincorporated into the governing economic, political, gender and racial logic. This study examines, therefore, literary representations of poverty, homelessness, forms of working-class labor, and the work that race and gender do within these conditions of existence. It arises from the intersection of the Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theory that has sought not only to account for the inequitable economic distribution of goods but also to confront the deeper problem of injurious power structures and hierarchies.

The literature of abandonment discounts the practice of seeking recognition within a dominant structure of power; rather, abandonment brings to light the spatial practice of the subject’s struggle for re-signification of such structures. Thus, one can begin to conceive of the abandoned subject by asking what one produces when one inhabits a space typically deemed uninhabitable—by discovering forms of being where one’s being is impossible or illicit—because it is in this act that subjectivity for the otherwise abject becomes possible. This study asks more specifically how literature as an aesthetic practice imagines the production of an abandoned subjectivity and, by extension, alternative social, economic and political structures.

The driving question of this dissertation is, how can a concept such as abandonment allow one to address without interpellating its subject? That is, can one value the abandoned as such, without incorporating it into an injurious system of evaluation or the prevailing neoliberal discourse of recognition? This entails asking how these processes are represented as being deeply aesthetic and what the relationship is between literary form and “habitat.” That the fact of abandonment is not quite available for representation, at least not without recovering it from itself, but is available for inhabitation, is illustrated in each of the texts this dissertation examines. In bridging socioeconomic material and thematic readings with a study of literary form, this dissertation argues that literature itself performs the very calling into being and inhabitation of this spectral space; which is to say, literary form lays bare the spatial underpinnings of narrative, allowing one to enter into the currents of dispossession rather than their fixed social positions.

This dissertation is a three-part analysis examining how the welfare state in advanced Western democracies has responded to recent demographic changes. Specifically, this dissertation investigates two primary relationships, beginning with the influence of government spending on poverty. I analyze two at-risk populations in particular: immigrants and children of single mothers. Next, attention is turned to the influence of individual and environmental traits on preferences for social spending. I focus specifically on religiosity, religious beliefs and religious identity. I pool data from a number of international macro- and micro-data sources including the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), International Social Survey Program (ISSP), the World Bank Databank, and the OECD Databank. Analyses highlight the power of the welfare state to reduce poverty, but also the effectiveness of specific areas of spending focused on addressing new social risks. While previous research has touted the strength of the welfare state, my analyses highlight the need to consider new social risks and encourage closer attention to how social position affects preferences for the welfare state.