The award-winning new book by Dr Andrew Fischer - 'Poverty as Ideology: Rescuing Social Justice from Global Development Agendas' will be published in mid-December 2018. The book won the International Studies in Poverty Prize awarded by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and Zed Books.
Poverty has become the central focus of global development efforts, with a vast body of research and funding dedicated to its alleviation. And yet, the field of poverty studies remains deeply ideological and has been used to justify wealth and power within the prevailing world order.
In this book, Andrew Fischer clarifies this deeply political character, from conceptions and measures of poverty through to their application as policies. He shows how our dominant approaches to poverty studies have served to reinforce the prevailing neoliberal ideology while neglecting the wider interests of social justice that are fundamental to creating more equitable societies.
He argues that an effective and lasting solution to global poverty requires us to reorient our efforts away from current fixations on productivity and towards more equitable distributions of wealth and resources.
- Associate professor
- More information