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Research Coordination Network Proposal: Relational Poverty Network
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| Research Coordination Network Proposal: Relational Poverty Network (PIs: Victoria Lawson & Sarah Elwood; 2013-2018) Project Description: Problem Statement and Network Goals We propose international research coordination to build new research and educational practices to advance poverty knowledge and solutions. This proposal builds a Relational Poverty Network (RPN) to complement and extend existing poverty research through a relational conceptualization of durable poverty (also referred to as persistent or chronic). This approach theorizes poverty as produced and addressed by economic, political and cultural relationships between social groups. The RPN will enliven and expand poverty research by bringing scholars from diverse theoretical and methodological traditions, disciplines and countries into new conversations in two ways. First, we will develop conceptual and methodological innovations that enable large-scale comparative mixed- methods research on durable poverty. Second, we will develop multi-directional flows of innovative ideas about how to address poverty: bringing together mainstream and relational scholarship and creating learning across disciplinary and national boundaries (called for by Ravallion, 2009; Smeeding, 2008). The core group of scholars from which the RPN will grow is cross-disciplinary, bringing together human geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, economists, anthropologists and philosophers working in the U.S., Argentina, South Africa, India, Canada and Thailand. The research coordination activities proposed here will build and institutionalize a multi-disciplinary network of social scientists who have wide-ranging expertise in both quantitative secondary data analysis and qualitative, case study research. The RPN will organize a series of research and educational activities over five years, bringing together junior and senior, U.S. and international researchers to design concepts, comparative methodology and data collection practices. Our activities will include: i. extensive outreach to researchers, think tanks and policy makers ii. conceptual innovations that operationalize relational poverty enabling rigorous empirically-grounded comparative study across countries iii. searchable web-based metadata for quantitative and qualitative data for participating countries, including primary data from ongoing research of RPN scholars; specifically designed for researchers to operationalize relational poverty concepts iv. an extensible research design for robust mixed-methods research and ‘many sites to many sites’ comparison v. a suite of collaborative grant proposals to carry out the RPN scientific agenda; vi. co-authored research papers on the RPN’s conceptual and methodological advances; vii. institutionalization of the RPN within the Comparative Research on Poverty Program (CROP – a program of the International Social Science Council (ISSC) at UNESCO http://www.crop.org/). CROP is an ideal long-term institutional partner for the RPN because it calls for precisely the kinds of research practice we will enact and provides a framework for dissemination of our findings through their website, the ISSC’s World Social Science Fellows program, 4 publications and conferences (see letter of collaboration). Our coordinated scientific and network building activities will be integrated from the outset with our educational, outreach and assessment efforts. The work of the RPN is timely because economic instability and inequality are on the rise in many countries as middle strata fragment into the ‘new poor’ and the ‘new rich’ (Pressman, 2007; Milanovic, 2005; Birdsall et. al, 2000). Indeed, poverty remains a durable challenge around the globe, even in countries with substantial middle classes such as Argentina, South Africa, India and the U.S. Hand in glove with social fragmentation, there has been a paradigm shift over the last fifty years in how societies address poverty. Post WWII public social policy frameworks are on the decline and are being replaced with highly targeted mechanisms of social provision including charity, non-profit and for-profit services. Within international development there is a similar shift towards tightly focused semi-private programs targeting only the extremely poor. These twin trends, of economic instability and shrinking public resources to address poverty simultaneously contribute to durable poverty and also shape public understandings of who is poor and why. Poverty researchers are calling for attention to “social relations, rules and meanings” that underlie poverty in order to build innovative and viable new policy tools that go beyond existing approaches (Addison, Hulme and Kanbur, 2009: 22; Woolcock, 2009). Against this backdrop, the RPN will build a research infrastructure that brings relational poverty approaches into conversation with mainstream poverty work in order to realize the potentials of intellectual collaboration. Download 268.48 Kb. Share with your friends:
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