Picture this: Representing Local Discourses of Poverty Reduction through Graphic Notetaking

Abstract

Poverty researchers, and in turn the poverty reduction practitioners they inform, often fail to conceptualize poverty as structural, evolving, systematic, complex and above all, political (Harriss 2012). A key aspect of this failure is the tendency to define and measure poverty in primarily economistic terms (Yapa 1996). Objective, economistic constructions of poverty are often depoliticized, as Elwood and Lawson (2018) assert, “to stabilize political-economic orders and power hierarchies” (p. 2). Understandings of poverty that fail to acknowledge its social and political dimensions can lead researchers to focus on questions such as “Why are poor people poor?” (Yapa, 1996). Such questions reinscribe poverty as a normal part of the social order and localize conversations of poverty to the individual. To avoid taking poverty for granted, we need to ask why specific groups of people in specific times, locations, and contexts are experiencing hunger, houselessness, lack of safety, mobility, health care, and barriers to participation in social life. We also need to ask the concomitant question, why do specific groups of people in particular times, locations, and contexts have differential access to material wealth, political legibility, and social value? Taking such a political approach, my research examines discourses of poverty within a local context. Additionally, I examine how engaging in these discourses visually, through the drawing of graphic notes, offers a way to excavate and explore some of the shortcomings and possibilities of poverty politics in Niagara. My research involves drawing a series of graphic notes for ten community consultations organized by the Niagara regional government which aimed to gather community input to inform the region’s process of writing a poverty reduction strategy.