Confronting poverty. How interdisciplinary collaboration can offer new routes to fight poverty

On April 3th the Circle U. Open Conversation "Confronting poverty. How interdisciplinary collaboration can offer new routes to fight poverty" will take place online (1.00 pm - 14.30pm).

Register here by 2nd April to participate.

Poverty resonates across several of Circle U.’s knowledge hubs. In addition to undermining democratic participation and decision-making, poverty affects access to health and sanitation as well as severely undermining migrant integration and social cohesion. Moreover, people living in poverty are more heavily affected by climate change. Finally, poverty limits access to higher education and learning opportunities.

Prior discussions highlighted how the narratives of politicians, official instances, academia, NGOs and society at large about poverty and the assignment of responsibility for it are intrinsically linked with the creation of reports and the formulation of poverty reduction policies. In the conversation, we will critically explore these connections by analyzing how the discourse on poverty influences policy design at three levels: nationally, within Circle U. countries; internationally, in relation to sustainable development and development aid; locally, in terms of access to higher education and opportunities therein.

The following phenomena will be discussed:

• Who is represented as responsible? Is responsibility for poverty represented as relying on the poor (e.g. they don’t want to work), on the government (e.g. the government doesn’t take care), other actors?
• Which terms are used to discuss poverty and what do they imply as to how poverty is defined and measured? Indeed, poverty is being discussed in many ways¸ e.g. through discourse on social sustainability.
• Who intervenes in the discourse on poverty and in the policies concerning poverty, and who remains unheard, leading to ‘blind spots’ in policymaking?

Thus, this conversation will address a clearly internationally relevant topic involving different Circle U. partners, with attention to the concrete societal impact of research on discourses on poverty. This societal impact will be made explicit in the Open Conversation through the involvement of partner organisations such as Louvain Coopération.

This Open Conversation will take place in the context of seedfund project Confronting poverty: Uniting disciplines for global impact, more precisely at the end of a workshop involving staff and students from UCLouvain, University of Pisa, University of Oslo and King’s College London, and partner Louvain Coopération. The Open Conversation will include presentations by the workshop participants, involving active participation of students as presenters.