In the United States, the causes and even the meanings of poverty are disconnected from the causes and meanings of global poverty. The Routledge Handbook of Poverty in the United States provides an authoritative overview of the relationship of poverty with the rise of neoliberal capitalism in the context of globalization.
Reorienting its national economy towards a global logic, US domestic policies have promoted a market-based strategy of economic development and growth as the obvious solution to alleviating poverty, affecting approaches to the problem discursively, politically, economically, culturally and experientially. However, the handbook explores how rather than alleviating poverty, it has instead exacerbated poverty and pre-existing inequalities - privatizing the services of social welfare and educational institutions, transforming the state from a benevolent to a punitive state, and criminalizing poor women, racial and ethnic minorities, and immigrants.
Key issues examined by the international selection of leading scholars in this volume include: income distribution, employment, health, hunger, housing and urbanization. With parts focusing on the lived experience of the poor, social justice and human rights frameworks - as opposed to welfare rights models - and the role of helping professions such as social work, health and education, this comprehensive handbook is a vital reference for anyone working with those in poverty, whether directly or at a macro level.
Stephen Nathan Haymes, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the College of Education and an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies and the Department of International Studies at DePaul University, Chicago. Professor Haymes' areas of research interest are Africana Philosophy, postcolonial theory, forced migration, and education, conflict and development. Currently, he is working on a project related to place-based education and eco-justice with displaced Afrodescendent communities and a Colombian Human Rights NGO. He serves as the co-editor of The Journal of Poverty: Innovations on Social, Political and Economic Inequalities, a quarterly peer review publication of the Taylor and Francis Group.
María Vidal de Haymes, Ph.D., is a Professor in the School of Social Work and Director of the Institute for Migration and International Social Work at Loyola University Chicago. She is co-editor of the The Journal of Poverty: Innovations on Social, Political and Economic Inequalities. She teaches courses in areas of social welfare policy and migration studies and her research addresses the economic and political incorporation of Latino immigrants in the United States; the impact of migration on family relationships, roles, and functioning; forced migration; the role of faith-based organizations in the pastoral and social accompaniment of migrants; child welfare; and social work education.
Reuben Jonathan Miller, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan. His research, writing, and advocacy work focus on the well-being of former prisoners living in large urban settings and the ways in which criminal justice and social welfare policy are daily experienced by urban poor populations.
