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Action Research for Transforming the Poverty Field. ARJ Special issue is out!

No one can really fight poverty without involving people living in poverty as agents of their own liberation.  That’s why Action Research for Transformation (ART) can play an extremely important role in eradicating extreme poverty. 

Nevertheless, for people experiencing poverty, there are many barriers to participation.  The “poverty field” imposes hierarchies that govern relationships among different stakeholders and people living in poverty are almost always at the bottom, where they experience silencing and shame.  Joseph Wresinski, who himself grew up in extreme poverty, wrote that “man’s greatest misfortune is not to be hungry or unable to read, nor even to be without work…(but) to know that you count for nothing, to the point where even your suffering is ignored. The worst blow of all is the contempt on the part of your fellow citizens.”

In other words, poverty is about relationships as much as it is about economics, so eradicating poverty means changing relationships among individuals, groups, and institutions. However, these relationships continue to exert influence even when stakeholder groups come together with the best participatory intentions.   

Our editorial, which introduces the ARJ Special Issue on “Action Research for Transforming the Poverty Field” features five papers that grapple with the challenge of participation for people experiencing poverty.  In the editorial we step back and ask: What do these five papers tell us about creating safe spaces, sharing and equalizing power, building trust, and creating conditions for people in poverty to think together among themselves and with other stakeholders in action research processes? 

Read the full editorial and the entire special issue!

Editorial: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14767503231221078