Abolishing Poverty: Toward Pluriverse Futures and Politics [Paperback]

Victoria Lawson (Author)
VICTORIA LAWSON is a professor of geography at the University of Washington and a past president of the Association of American Geographers.

Sarah Elwood (Author)
SARAH ELWOOD is a professor of geography at the University of Washington. With Victoria Lawson, she codirects the Relational Poverty Network.

Abolishing Poverty argues for a project of relationality that refuses the whiteness of liberal poverty studies and instead centers critiques of the poverty relation and political futures disavowed under liberal governance. In disrupting poverty thinking, the author collective opens space for diverse frameworks for understanding impoverishment and articulating antiracist knowledges and political visions. The book explores new infrastructures of possibilities and political solidarities rooted in accountable relations to each other and from flights to the future that animate diverse communities.

This book is boundary and genre crossing, with broad appeal to scholars of such disciplines as human geography, ethnic studies, decolonial theory, and feminist studies. As a volume, the work is unique in its primary field of human geography in the form of its making, its collective authorship, and its investigation of politics that abolish poverty thinking and engage in activism against the poverty relation produced through settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.

Engages new frameworks for understanding poverty politicsAbolishing Poverty explores some of the most pressing questions in geography—and social science more broadly—about how to develop and honor knowledges that have been marginalized by white supremacist and liberal logics and practices—and in the process to engage in the academic and political project of abolishing poverty slý