Publications
Academic Papers
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Submerged: surfacing deep poverty during permacrisis
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This paper surfaces the ‘hidden injuries’ of deepening privation that are often occluded through prevailing modes of poverty analysis. We do so by drawing on qualitative longitudinal, ethnographic research to examine what bearing a sustained period of instability and insecurity has had on the everyday survival strategies, sociality and health of those on the lowest incomes in the UK. Focusing on the experiences retained and recovered through a more inclusive sampling, recruitment and retention strategy, we evidence distinctive features of deep poverty and demonstrate how those worst affected by permacrisis are also those most likely to fall outwith the sociological gaze and research process. Attending to the empirical problem and theoretical potential of absence in poverty research, we reflect on the corpus of experience we tend to centre in sociological analysis, and the corpus of experience that is left behind in the process.
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​Who counts in poverty research?
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Mainstream poverty analysis currently renders certain people and degrees of privation more socially legible than others across high-income countries. This paper examines how these hierarchies carry through to and corrupt wider social scientific analysis, inscribing differential value to actors and phenomena in ways that undermine social understanding and explanation. First, conventional approaches to poverty analysis and measurement obscure the de facto prevalence of deep poverty, as well as those most subject to its violence. Second, a growing number of hyper-marginalised groups are missing from population income surveys, undermining the accuracy of (deep) poverty estimates and public understanding of both its determinants and dynamics. Third, the inferential and external validity of income surveys is significantly diminished by problems surrounding data quality and coverage. Attempts to address this have principally focused on improving data quality, but as demonstrated in this paper, these strategies exacerbate poor representation of the lowest-income groups in distributional analysis. Much more than merely technical or pragmatic, these are theoretical and normative judgements about who counts in welfare policy and politics. Overall, I demonstrate how current data practices occlude some the most violent forms of denigration and exploitation that structure advanced marginality, particularly the gendered, racialised, bordering and ableist practices underpinning state-citizen dynamics. Focusing principally on the UK context, I argue that the epistemic erasure committed features in and systematises a policy blindness to deep poverty for some of the most marginalised social groups making it harder to evidence its effects and address its causes across high-income countries.
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Indentured: benefit deductions, debt recovery and welfare disciplining
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The UK social security system performs an important role as a creditor and debt collector for many benefit claimants, with more affected by deductions than formal welfare conditionality or sanctions. Deductions, then, are central to understanding low-income life in the UK. With that in mind, this paper draws on a mixed-methods project to explore the policy rationale, administration and effects of benefit deductions at a particular moment of crisis. Through new analysis of statistical releases, I evidence increasing indebtedness and an Inverse Care Law, whereby UK social security performs worst for those who need it most. Drawing on qualitative longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the height of the cost-of-living crisis, I also evidence how deductions affect the lives and trajectories of low-income claimants over time. The analysis offered details how deductions weaponize debt, often in ways that financialise benefit claimants and their entitlements that prove counter-productive to the stated policy objectives of deductions: worsening the poverty-debt trap and pushing people (further) away from the labour market.
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Plumbing the depths: the changing (socio-demographic) profile of UK poverty
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Official statistics tend to rely on a headcount approach to poverty measurement, distinguishing ‘the poor’ from the ‘non-poor’ on the basis of an anchored threshold. Invariably, this does little to engage with the gradations of material hardship affecting those living, to varying degrees, below the poverty line. In response, this paper interrogates an apparent flatlining in UK poverty to establish the changing profile of poverty, as well as those most affected by it. Drawing on the Family Resources survey, this paper reveals an increasing depth of poverty in the UK since 2010, with bifurcation observable in the living standards of different percentile groups below the poverty line. In addition, this paper demonstrates substantial compositional changes in the socio-demographic profile of (deep) poverty. Since 2010, the likelihood of falling into deep poverty has increased for women, children, larger families, Black people and those in full-time work. Within the context of COVID-19, I argue there is a need to re-think how we currently conceptualise poverty by better attending to internal heterogeneity within the broader analytical and methodological category of ‘the poor’. Doing so raises questions about the prevailing modes of poverty measurement that tend to frame and delimit the social scientific analysis of poverty, as well as the policies deemed appropriate in tackling it.​​​
​The distinctive nature and effects of deep poverty: a hybrid case for minimum income schemes
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Where should finite resources be targeted when tackling poverty? To answer this question, this article draws on new analysis of the largest nationally representative household panel study in the UK to explore what bearing shallower and deeper forms of poverty have on financial trajectories, as well as health and well-being over time. While distinguishing between those above and below the relative poverty line has clear analytical and empirical value, our results show that this approach risks obscuring important dynamics and outcomes associated with varying degrees of poverty. In line with previous studies, we find that income increases improve health and well-being. However, we also find that deep poverty as a social kind is considerably and consistently harder to escape, as well as more damaging to mental health well-being, loneliness and life satisfaction. Crucially, transient experiences of deep poverty also prove more damaging than chronic, shallower forms of poverty. As such, we present evidence of distinct and profound effects of deep poverty that offer new grounds upon which to justify, time and target policy interventions across the low-income distribution. We employ income-based, material deprivation, and multidimensional measures of poverty, with the latter providing the most robust results for identifying the distinctive nature of deep poverty. The evidence presented helps establish an empirically informed case for Minimum Income Schemes (MIS) and the relatively superior returns on public social spending these could offer on both prioritiarian and consequentialist grounds.
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