Shortly after Israel went into lockdown, alongside many other societies across the globe, one of us received a call from Elinor. A single mother of one living in a suburban town, Elinor was wondering how she would procure food, given that she had neither a car to reach a supermarket, nor a credit card to shop online.
Our colleague knew Elinor through her activism and doctoral research on women who live in poverty in Israel. Being familiar with the field and aware that Elinor’s predicament was not unique, she proposed that the five of us, three academics and two activists, study the impact of COVID-19, and particularly of the prolonged lockdown, on people who live in persistent poverty. Before embarking on this research, we asked ourselves how we might avoid the risk of othering or alienating those who live in poverty. In other words, we wanted not only to learn how women and men were coping with the forced isolation and the state-wide economic slowdown, but also to also listen to them and give them a voice.
Being academically interested in life in poverty calls for caution. For decades, poverty has been studied and taught from a perspective that either objectifies ‘the poor’ or blames them for being poor. Ignoring the responsibility of the state and society for the predicament of poverty is only one lacuna in this field of study. Another is missing out on, or explicitly ignoring, the voice and perspective of those who are experiencing it directly. We thus opted for a different approach.
Being familiar with feminist and poverty-aware approaches that seek to give voice to people in poverty, we created a digital tool that would allow our interlocutors to express themselves and share their experiences at their own discretion. Those who responded to our call for participation and who self-identified as experiencing poverty were given a link, to be used from their mobile phone, to a personal diary where they could document in their own words or images how their day was spent and how they were feeling. The diaries they shared with us revealed the hopes, fears and daily hardships that they endured, in ordinary times as well as in less than ordinary, COVID-19 times. Yet, gathering these raw data was only one step in resisting the othering of people in poverty. The other step we took was designed to address the unequal power relations between the researchers and the researched.
The risk of othering those who live in persistent poverty is entrenched in those aspects of class and education that distinguish researchers from researched. Our team of academics and activist-researchers, the latter themselves experiencing poverty, was set two goals. One, to be constantly informed by two sources of knowledge – the academic and the lived; the other, to create trustful relationships with our interlocutors and to allow them to safely share not merely their daily routine but also their deeper thoughts and emotions. This method proved itself in the candidness of our interlocutors and their willingness to allow us not only to use their diaries, but also in some cases, to cite them with their own names. The main reason for this was their willingness to use our research as a vehicle for them to speak for themselves. The data, which we analysed as a team, have taught us much about how ‘doing family while poor’ is experienced and understood.
The recent scholarship on poverty often explores expressions of agency, resilience and care among those living in poverty. Yet, ascribing resourcefulness to people who experience persistent poverty risks reproducing the outsider’s gaze, as it grants the researcher the privilege of assessing how adjusted and deserving her research subjects are. Poverty, we propose, is one major ‘family trouble’, in the words of David Morgan, that is a problem which not only disrupts the normal expectations of family members but is at the same time a part of their everyday life. As such, coping with this trouble requires the mobilisation of personal resources from resourcefulness and resilience to networking and even political knowhow. As our method allowed our diarists a more adequate means of self-representation, we were exposed to a whole range of emotions and understandings about tendencies of continuity and change in their lives at times of social isolation and emergency. In particular, we were able to identify social awareness of the politics of poverty, consisting of negative emotions emanating from one’s constant struggles against a harsh reality of inequality, which do not yet lead to paralysis and inaction. We dub this state agentic hopelessness.
Hopelessness may indeed seem a little harsh, or worse, as yet another take on the frequently rehearsed ‘blaming the victim’ argument. However, as critical sociologists and activists, we sought to be able to document life in poverty as it is experienced and mediated in the words of the people themselves. From this we learn about the daily struggles and manoeuvres at a time when many paths were closed, from welfare agencies and NGOs that were shut down to the availability of undocumented jobs, such as cleaning and babysitting. Yet, this life of toil had not prevented our diarists from feeling abandoned by the state and by society at large. At the same time, their agency had not hidden their feeling of hopelessness, a feeling which is possibly the only rational reaction left. This meant acknowledging that there is nothing ‘brave’, ‘simple’ or ‘empowering’ about living in poverty. Poverty is hopeless, and it became even more so in the state of emergency that was inflicted by the state at the time of the pandemic. This hopelessness is not merely material (which of course it is). It is also affective. And most importantly, in the lives of our diarists, feeling hopeless does not translate into inaction.
Gal Levy (PhD, LSE) is a senior teaching faculty & researcher at the Open University, Israel and a visiting associate professor at Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Gal is engaged in studying poverty and activism. In 2022, Gal was the first recipient of the distinguished award of civic and community engagement of The Israeli Political Science Association.
Dr. Dana Kaplan is senior lecturer at the Open University of Israel. A cultural sociologist by training, she specializes in cultural class analysis and middle class everyday life. Her recent book, What is Sexual Capital? co-authored with Eva Illouz, has been published in 2022 by Polity Press.
Riki Kohan-Benlulu is a mother of five who lives in public housing. Riki is an activist for the rights of people who live in poverty and she won the Sami Michael Prize for Equality and Social Justice for 2021 for her leadership in the struggle for public housing. Since 2017 she is also a co-researcher in an ongoing research on women in poverty.
Avigail Biton is an activist and activist-journalist at the independent alternative online media outlet Ha-Makom. Avigail is a teacher and research assistant and she is now completing an MA degree in education.
Helly Buzhish Sasson is a PhD candidate in anthropology at The Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University. Her research focuses on poverty and Resistance from The Margins at the Intersection of Gender, Class and Ethnicity. Helly is an activist for marginalized communities rights and a board member of ‘shovrot kirot’ (Breaking Walls) – a grassroots movement that promotes civic, feminist community activism and public campaigns.
Doing family while poor: agentic hopelessness as lived knowledge by Dana Kaplan, Gal Levy, Helly Buzhish-Sasson, Avigail Biton and Riki Kohan-Benlulu is available on Bristol University Press Digital. Read here.
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