Volume: Volume 17 - 2013

Article type: Refereed article

Author/s: Brand, Danie; De Beer, Stephan; De Villiers, Isolde; and Van Marle, Karin

In this exploratory article the authors focus on a tendency in discourses on poverty to reduce poverty to a practical problem, and efforts to find solutions to poverty to practical, instrumentalist (social) scientific thinking. Working from a theoretical position informed by, among others, Constable, Bergowitz, Foucault, De Certeau, Friedman and the liberation theology of Boff & Boff and Gutierrez they argue for the reconfiguring of poverty as an injustice and the re-insertion of politics in debates about poverty that this will entail. From different disciplines and from different perspectives within disciplines, they engage in a multi-disciplinary exploration of, and reflection on, the prevalence of poverty.

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