INTRODUCTION

In 2014, Doreen Massey discussed the Kilburn Manifesto at the American Association of Geographers Meeting. “The Kilburn” is a project she co-organized with Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin that is at once powerful public scholarship and potent political intervention. The room felt like a political meeting – packed with people sitting on the floor and standing in the doorways, all in rapt attention. She ended by noting that the current project of government is one in which “we must not be allowed to know that there are alternatives – we must not know that hegemonies are not totalities” (Massey 2014, authors’ emphasis). She argued that in the face of widely circulating ideology scripting the current neoliberal conjuncture of financialized and globalized capitalism as natural, inevitable and ideal, the Left must narrate it instead as a complex economic, philosophical, moral and political crisis. That night, as in countless other interventions throughout her career, Doreen insisted that cracking open hegemonies is urgent political work that requires new modes of thought, action, and solidarities (see also Hall & Massey 2010).

We take up this charge in relation to poverty. Poverty is a central site of politics, resistance and struggle over “common sense” that shapes how members of a society relate to each other. We respond to Doreen and her co-authors’ call in the Kilburn Manifesto to repoliticize poverty, and turn to Hall and Massey’s (2010) conjunctural analysis as one avenue towards doing so. Conjunctural analysis traces the social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are held together in particular space-times and makes visible the techniques by which these contradictions are rendered invisible, unremarkable and off limits for intervention. We argue that persistent poverty is one such contradiction that must be repoliticized because its very persistence challenges economistic narratives of “progress” and “fairness”. Repoliticizing poverty stands to crack open the hegemony of neoliberal market fundamentalism, imagine alternatives and build new political solidarities.

In this chapter, we repoliticize poverty. This involves two moves: first, we trace “thinkable politics” that stabilize the political-economic and sociocultural processes of impoverishment.