Introduction: symposium on Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements

ABSTRACT

This symposium on Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements includes commentaries by Sally Matthews, Renante D. Pilapil, Violetta Igneski, and Wouter Peeters, with a reply from Deveaux. The book makes the case that normative thinking about poverty should engage closely with the aims, insights, and actions of poor-led organizations and social movements. Challenging conventional framings of poverty by moral philosophers, Deveaux argues that chronic poverty is centrally about the subordination and dispossession of the poor – not mere needs scarcity. To exclude people living in poverty from shaping antipoverty solutions is therefore to perpetuate their social-political domination and epistemic oppression. Deveaux’s book explains what a political reframing of poverty looks like from the vantage point of several poor-led organizations and social movements, using concrete examples from across the globe, and argues for political responsibility for solidarity with those movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Poverty
• social movements
• global justice
• political philosophy
• solidarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canada Research Chairs Program (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada).

Notes on contributors

Monique Deveaux

Monique Deveaux has held the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Ethics & Global Social Change at the University of Guelph since 2010, where she is also Professor of Philosophy. She has authored or co-edited books on multiculturalism, exploitation, and the thought of Onora O’Neill. She is an editor for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Grounded and Engaged Normative Theory.