A Discomforting Pedagogy of Poverty: Discourses,Representations and Vulnerabilities

Abstract

Discomfort is pedagogically significant in encouraging learners to step out of their comfort zone to explore how systems of meaning are implicated in the stigmatising processes of those who experience poverty. In this article, we propose a discomforting pedagogy of poverty and outline a set of inter-related tools for teachers and learners to interpret these processes with the aim of unsettling normalised views of poverty in the classroom. We offer a practice-based reflection of using this pedagogic approach, which asks students to contemplate individually and collectively how they are entangled in discourses, representations and shared vulnerabilities. By scaffolding discomfort in a supportive environment, we contend that a deeper engagement with the structural realities of poverty offers an alternative learning pathway to make sense of poverty as difficult sociological knowledge.

Keywords

difficult sociological knowledge discomforting pedagogy poverty discourses poverty representations poverty vulnerabilities

Introduction

The implications of educating students on social injustice topics such as poverty within the wider realms of the neoliberal university is not without its challenges. Indeed, poverty eradication has a special place among the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the cornerstone of all other SDGs, requiring strategies and actions from all sectors of society, including education (Gudić et al., 2017). Yet what often goes unrecognised is how universities are deeply implicated in practices that impact poverty and growing inequality (Fotaki and Prasad, 2015). They are frequently located within or near environments riddled with poverty (Peredo and Moore, 2008); they make strategic decisions that can ameliorate or worsen economic difficulties (e.g. where to locate new campus facilities); they may contribute to the cost-of-living crisis (e.g. casual contracts) and equally, they have the power to transform the living conditions of the communities with whom they interact. Given the dramatic but overlooked ways in which universities and poverty are entwined, to ignore the latter in our teaching not only removes students from an important part of social reality but also hinders their critical awareness of how experiences of poverty both impact society and are shaped by structural forces and everyday decisions (including their own). Yet, many classrooms remain silent on the multiple, overlapping inequalities created by relative poverty in particular, or if they are not silent, frame them as the result of individual choices (Giroux, 2020). This is the consequence of the narrow pedagogy of the neoliberal university, within which competitiveness, winning and individualism are hallmarks of success, while criticality and moral responsibility are rebuffed (Giroux, 2010).

Consistent with Peredo and Moore (2008), we therefore consider it urgent to connect students and our content to the broader society around us and in particular to those who suffer the shame, struggle and humiliation of poverty. We argue that to imbue students with a more nuanced understanding of the challenges poverty presents, a new learning approach is required; one that is unsettling and deliberately challenging to reflect the troubling realities we face. Inside the sociological classroom, such discomfort can arise when students are asked to contemplate the ways they have benefited from various forms of privilege to which they had previously paid little attention. In this way, discomfort is pedagogically significant in encouraging students to step out of their comfort zone to explore how social discourses and representations are implicated in the stigmatising processes of those who experience poverty and its associated vulnerabilities.

Despite significant prosperity and economic growth, current levels of poverty in the UK are close to 50% higher than they were 50 years ago (Campbell and Tyler, 2024). Against this statistical backdrop are misperceptions of poverty as something that others experience (Rank et al., 2021) or worse, that others deserve (Furnham, 2003). Students arrive in the classroom with the ideological baggage of the dominant culture, valuing power, winning and materialism, with those needing help believed to be responsible for, or deserving of, their condition (Giacalone and Promislo, 2013). This ideology is entwined with, and mutually reinforcing of, the circulation of affects (Ahmed, 2004) and, in particular, the attachment of fear and contempt of those experiencing poverty. Thus, to accurately situate poverty as a distinct condition of economic and class inequality, also means challenging stigmatising classifications of poverty as a central task in this agenda (Campbell and Tyler, 2024). Such meanings and beliefs emerge from and are embedded in personal, social discourses and mediatised representations. These elements receive little attention in poverty pedagogies as they intersect with experiential vulnerabilities and therefore have implications both for what we teach and for how we teach it (Culley and Portuges, 1985), to avoid producing mere consciousness-raising exercises for more privileged students.

Building on the extant work of sociologists teaching poverty (Bramesfeld and Good, 2015; Frank and Rice, 2017; Frank et al., 2020; Layth, 2023; Mayer et al., 2019; Steck et al., 2011), this article proposes a new departure for poverty education in terms of teaching approach and content. We adopt Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort with the overarching aim of unsettling normalising views associated with poverty and apply this pedagogy to a series of practice-informed reflections structured around a three-dimensional framework of inter-related analytical tools: (1) discourses; (2) representations; and (3) vulnerabilities. The inherent discomfort in each of these aspects impels critical thinking and inquiry in the learner (Boler and Zembylas, 2003) as unsettling feelings are deemed crucial for challenging dominant worldviews and habits that sustain inequalities, thus creating openings for personal and collective transformation (Zembylas, 2015). For illustrative purposes, we reflect on our experiences of teaching poverty to successive cohorts of postgraduate students over a three-year period who opted to participate in a one-day thematic seminar exploring a range of issues related to ethics and social responsibility.

Consistent with Byran’s (2016) dual emphasis on difficult sociological knowledge and discomfort in the classroom, we suggest that poverty is illustrative of difficult sociological knowledge, painful and challenging to engage with, yet one that cannot be glossed over in which the ‘student self’ comes to terms with, negotiates and acknowledges the circumstances of the impoverished ‘other’. What we offer here is an exploratory pedagogic approach to the teaching of a complex issue. With this in mind, we do not suggest that our approach is ‘best practice’ as not only is poverty complex but, as Ellsworth (2005: 111) observes, ‘pedagogical practice often drives toward concluding statements that offer effective teaching strategies, or prescriptions for educational interventions’. Rather, our goal is to illuminate a set of pedagogical tools to help learners and teachers engage with poverty as difficult sociological knowledge. An approach that asks them to contemplate how they are entangled in the personal and social discourses, mediatised representations and connected vulnerabilities of poverty.

Teaching Poverty: Difficult and Discomforting Sociological Knowledge

Poverty is often understood as something that happens to other people; however, evidence demonstrates that poverty is a widespread phenomenon in both affluent and less affluent countries. The Social Metrics Commission’s (2024) report clearly highlights that poverty rates today are the highest this century, with nearly one in four people in the UK now considered to be in poverty, and 62% of those in poverty living in families where someone works at least part time (SMC, 2024). If we look to the United States as the largest economy in the world, 58% of the population will experience poverty at some point in their lives, with a further 76% of the population at ‘near’ poverty levels at one point in the adult lifespan (Rank et al., 2021). The current acceleration of poverty and near-poverty levels in the UK is underpinned by a deepening cost-of-living crisis and a growing recognition that poverty experiences are complex and dynamic, encompassing much more than an overt focus on income (Lister, 2021). The intricacies of poverty have been expanded in recent times to include lived experience conceptualisations by communities, which (Bray et al., 2019) have categorised as: core experiences of disempowerment, daily struggle and suffering in body, mind and heart. The stigmatising and antagonistic relational dynamics that occur as a result of impoverishment. These range from institutional maltreatment, social stigma, disrespect, unrecognised contributions to community, social and working life and finally, privations, which translate as a lack of decent work, insufficient and insecure income and the associated material and social deprivation that ensues as a consequence (Bray et al., 2019). Despite sociologists’ inherent commitment to those who endure poverty, efforts to develop an extensive body of pedagogic research and teaching frameworks on poverty and its complexities remain open for significant expansion (Frank et al., 2020; Krumer-Nevo et al., 2009).

Teaching poverty may be approached through conventional didactic instructional methods and intellectual argumentation indicative of the heroic approach to pedagogy (Lesko and Bloom, 1998) for knowledge acquisition (Steck et al., 2011; Troyna and Rizvi, 1997). However, such methods are rendered less helpful when topics have a clear social justice emphasis, as students’ attitudes and assumptions about people who are impoverished cannot be influenced by the provision of information alone (Steck et al., 2011). Scholars who have devoted time to the sociological merits of teaching poverty skilfully demonstrate the role a poverty-specific curricula can play in strengthening students’ understanding of poverty as a distinct and intransigent societal problem. These pedagogic approaches take several forms and concentrate on specific aspects of impoverished realities. The most extensively used approach is experiential learning effectively applied within the classroom through simulations and game-based learning (Bramesfeld and Good, 2015; Layth, 2023; Steck et al., 2011) and applied outside the classroom through community-based education (Steck et al., 2011; Sullivan-Catlin, 2002). Despite adopting divergent forms of experiential learning, both simulations and community service-learning pedagogies seek to close empathy gaps and foster attitudinal adjustments about poverty (Frank and Rice, 2017; Frank et al., 2020; Mayer et al., 2019). To illustrate, Steck et al.’s (2011: 260) Community Action Poverty Simulation (CAPS) builds on a number of experiential focused simulations on poverty to offer a ‘mirroring of real life’, with Bramesfeld and Good (2015) designing simulations to help students reflect on explanations for poverty and its multi-dimensional nature across the life span. Both simulations require structured self-reflection from students after their involvement as a participant. The explicit aims of which are to reinforce the complexity of social stratification (Bramesfeld and Good, 2015; Layth, 2023), to alter stereotypical ideas about people who experience poverty (Steck et al., 2011) and to contemplate the role of privilege and oppression in maintaining systems of inequality (Bramesfeld and Good, 2015). Building on the efficacy of simulation-based experiential learning, Layth’s (2023) innovative classroom game ‘Spent!’ attempts to connect access to and control over resources indicative of impoverished tradeoffs. Particularly unique to this simulation is how it enables students who are less economically privileged than their classroom peers an opportunity to share their situated knowledge and unique cultural capital in a way that is self-affirming.

Turning to community-based experiential learning, Sullivan-Catlin (2002) advocates a thematic focus, in this instance connecting food, hunger and poverty as a useful context for students to engage with relevant readings and activities. Complementing this thematic turn is the need to develop students’ compassion and responsiveness to perceptions of poverty. To facilitate this, scholars recommend curricular interventions and frameworks for interrogating negative attitudes, individualised reflection and experiential activities with the ‘potential to create an environment where poverty stereotypes are questioned and rejected’ (Frank and Rice, 2017: 400). Indicative of a layered teaching approach, these emerging forms of empathetic pedagogies engage academic texts and film, combined with service-learning student placements and empirical learning exercises through poverty research workshops to develop empathy at the individual, contextual and social level (Frank and Rice, 2017; Frank et al., 2020; Mayer et al., 2019; Segal, 2007, 2011). This social empathy approach has been welcomed for shifting the pedagogic emphasis towards the structural causes of poverty (Weaver and Yun, 2011), a central goal of sociological learning (Persell, 2010). It further acts as a gateway for reducing disparities ‘between cultural perceptions and lived realities’ (Adelman et al., 2016: 1452). Yet despite the growth of innovative developments in teaching about poverty, scholars have been transparent about the limitations of simulations and community service-learning. The inherent challenges of dismantling entrenched belief systems constructed by and through various agents of socialisation, such as families, peers and the media, have been highlighted as particularly problematic (Steck et al., 2011). Furthermore, the risks of service-learning experiences for potentially reinforcing, rather than eradicating, stereotypes held by students have been illuminated (Marullo, 1998).

As the sociological dimensions of poverty are often constructed around certain ‘structures of feeling’ (Troyna and Rizvi, 1997: 254), poverty as a complex, intricate and multi-dimensional experience demands a diversity of educational approaches in terms of content and approach. This also requires an appreciation of ‘know[ing] the limits of pedagogy’ and ‘putting these to productive use’ (Ellsworth, 2005: 115), while recognising ‘what makes knowledge difficult in teaching and learning’ (Pitt and Britzman, 2003: 757–758). We contend that poverty is difficult sociological knowledge to teach; difficult not only because of the disquieting nature of the content of the knowledge itself, but also because the learner’s interaction and engagement with this content can be unsettling (Bryan, 2016; Simon, 2011; Zembylas, 2014). As such, we propose that poverty is both uncomfortable in its representation and an uncomfortable learning process in which the student self comes to terms with, negotiates and acknowledges the circumstances of impoverished ‘others’. To teach the ‘what’ of poverty (difficult sociological knowledge) we propose that the ‘how’ or pedagogic approach is fundamental to realising the educational goal of helping students explore and contest stigmatising processes of poverty.

Building on the existing work of sociologists on poverty, we propose an alternative framework for poverty education, focusing on both teaching approach and content. We adopt Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort with the overarching aim of unsettling normalised views associated with poverty. The pedagogy of discomfort asserts that learning about social injustices makes students uncomfortable and that their affective reactions to that discomfort substantially shape their ability to learn from it. For their existing understandings to be transformed, students must therefore spend time outside their ‘comfort zones’ (Boler, 1999: 176). This pedagogy is underscored by the realisation that discomforting emotions play a fundamental role in facilitating individual and social transformation by driving the contestation of pervasive beliefs, habits and practices underlying social inequality and injustice (Zembylas and McGlynn, 2012). Indeed, Bryan’s (2016) account of teaching uncomfortable material makes a compelling case for the importance of emotions in education for social justice; creating a space in the classroom to engage with discomforting emotions helped students’ reflexivity as well as their responsiveness to, and ethical engagement with, matters of injustice (Bryan, 2016). On the contrary, overlooking emotional engagement when dealing with matters of social justice precludes change, leaving students unable to see their proximity to or complicity with those very prejudices (Bryan, 2016).

Pedagogies of discomfort also possess an ethical dimension that stresses the importance of never becoming complacently comfortable in one’s understanding of the world and the need to remain open to the transformative potential of this unease. For example, it is considered important not to fall into ‘passive empathy’, in which a superficial identification of oneself with the victim of an injustice is substituted for a resolve to correct the problem (Boler, 1999: 178; Zembylas and McGlynn, 2012). Rather, students should be challenged to act upon their awareness of injustice (Zembylas and McGlynn, 2012). Discomfort should emerge from learners’ reflexivity and their realisation of their own complicity in the social injustices that cause discomfort. This attention to the transformative effect of emotions aligns with a view of teaching and learning as cognitive and affective experiences of great emotional complexity (Bryan, 2016; Zembylas, 2014). Importantly, Boler’s (1999) account of a pedagogy of discomfort focuses primarily on the discomfort generated by ambiguity. It invites both students and teachers to critically examine their perceptions and assumptions and reflect upon the emotions arising from such examination, such as anger, fear of change and fear of losing personal or cultural identities. In doing so, it raises an understanding of how such affects influence what one chooses to see and ignore, which can lead to reductive oversimplification and binary ways of thinking (Boler, 1999).

Ahmed (2004) identifies affect as circulating between bodies, discourses and objects, ‘binding’ individuals into a collective and attaching meaning to particular figures. Through this circulation, emotions ‘stick’ to bodies, such as fear or disgust of the ‘undeserving poor’ (Gans, 1972), thereby reinforcing prejudices and making certain narratives feel affectively true, legitimate or even inevitable (Ahmed, 2004). A specific risk inherent in efforts to engage students affectively is that students may quickly forget the initial impact of emotionally charged material once they leave the carefully constructed affective economy of the classroom, even in circumstances where the material is presented by a supportive teacher, alongside (hopefully) motivated peers, and with a physical environment engineered to maintain collective focus. We believe that discomfort can overcome this risk, following Ahmed (2014: 13) who suggests that lasting understanding is generated from the ‘sweat’ of discomfort; ‘a description of how it feels not to be at home in the world, or a description of the world from the point of view of not being at home in it’. Such concepts are lasting and transformative because of the mental and embodied effort needed to produce them and enabled by the interpretive schemes of social practice such as education (Reckwitz, 2012).

We therefore propose a shift towards discomfort when teaching poverty as sociological knowledge, to encompass discourses, representations and vulnerabilities, following Ahmed (2004, 2014) in attending to how affects circulate through these forms, shaping how narratives of poverty are legitimised or become ‘natural’. In the next section, we outline our exploratory approach for developing a discomforting pedagogy of poverty. We examine how systems of meaning work, asking students to interrogate ideological systems that produce and support discrimination (Lesko and Bloom, 1998) while also exploring the nuances of this experience. In this way, we seek to encourage and to equip students with interpretive tools to problematise the interconnected workings of ideological systems, categories of representations, as well as the experiential as contestable (Scott, 1992).

Practice Reflections: Poverty Discourses, Representations and Vulnerabilities

We now offer a practice-based reflection of our discomforting pedagogies of poverty, which aimed to encourage a critical inquiry at a cognitive as well as an emotional level on issues of the present, rather than utopian ideals (Boler and Zembylas, 2003; Peterson et al., 2015). We reflect on our experiences of teaching poverty to successive cohorts of postgraduate students over a three-year period who opted to participate in a one-day thematic seminar exploring a range of issues related to ethics and social responsibility. Consistent with a post-qualitative approach (Ahmed, 2017; Chadwick, 2021; St. Pierre, 2021), our reflections were generated from our unstructured experiences and ad-hoc notes as teacher-observers. Furthermore, we have sought to derive theoretical concepts directly from these experiences, following in the tradition of Ahmed (2017). In this section we discuss in detail what may be taken as evidence of affect to contribute to enhanced theoretical understandings of poverty pedagogies (Knudsen and Stage, 2015).

Our approach to delivery and content design was inspired by the complementary use of Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort, Bryan’s (2016) account of emotionality in the sociological classroom and Pitt and Britzman’s (2003: 755) seminal conception of difficult knowledge defined as ‘representations of the social [trauma] in the curriculum and the individual’s encounters with them in pedagogy’. As we will now discuss, poverty as a pedagogical topic of discomfort asks students to analyse their own positionalities in a myriad of local and global injustices (Andreotti, 2014; Boler, 1999). Our seminar goal was to provide the cohort with a set of interpretive tools to encourage them to explore and contest three inter-related aspects of structural poverty: discourses, representations and vulnerabilities.

Discourses: Exploring and Contesting the Personal and the Social

Often students do not recognise how their own embeddedness, in particular social norms, and how their values might affect their views of disadvantaged groups. As educators we attempted to support the interruption of these processes with activities that called into question these views. ‘Discourses’ was chosen as the first teaching theme to facilitate group discussions on poverty from a number of angles; the personal, the academic and the collective. Learning occurs when students participate in discourses of an unfamiliar knowledge community and teaching supports this participation (Northedge, 2003), therefore we asked students to work individually and then in groups to brainstorm and discuss keywords and vocabulary they typically associated with poverty. They were encouraged to use their own words, thoughts and examples and were discouraged from attempting to provide formal definitions. Students then shared the details of their self-reflection as much as they were comfortable with. Following an initial hesitancy the comments offered were punctuated by awkward pauses paired with emotional distancing. Discourses tended to concentrate on individual responsibility and geographic stereotyping such as ‘poverty only exists in impoverished inner-city neighbourhoods’ and ‘people need better budgeting skills’ then immediately followed by ‘but I personally don’t really believe this’. A persistent discourse across cohorts focused on hard work (responsibilisation) and doing what one could to ‘break the culture of poverty’, which is an established social discourse despite countervailing evidence that most people who experience poverty do so in short-term spells across their lifespan (Rank et al., 2021). After collectively examining the theoretical frames that are used to explore poverty in academic literature and the formal definitions of poverty and deprivation, students visually mapped and compared these theoretical frames with their personal and collective ones to identify and expose such discrepancies and inconsistencies. During this discussion, we noted interactions were less tentative with students audibly expressing surprise and animated moments of realisation when presented with evidence to the contrary.

As the hegemony of poverty is maintained through discourses including ideas, texts, theories and language about an underclass (Hamilton, 2012) this mapping exercise exposed key inconsistencies and discourse regimes that operate to legitimise what can be said, who has the authority to speak and what is sanctioned as true (Bell, 2007; Kreisberg, 1991). Conditions of oppression in everyday life become normal when we internalise attitudes and roles that support and reinforce systems of domination without question or challenge. This exercise was pivotal for students to vocalise and identify the underlying assumptions that produce and reproduce the structures of domination related to poverty. It confirmed how they had looked at poverty through a distorted lens separating the rich from the poor, working people from those unemployed and those who ‘worked hard’ versus those ‘who lived on benefits’ or ‘enjoyed cheap social housing’. To expose these uncomfortable binary oppositions or dualisms was an important step for structuring the meaning of social relationships of difference (Kenway et al., 1994). It also highlighted how emotions circulate in political and cultural discourses and stick to certain figures (in this case, those living in poverty) (Ahmed, 2004). They sustain narratives of poverty that effectively dehumanise people and render them ‘unworthy’ of dignity – the ‘lazy, undeserving person on benefits’, the ‘scrounger’ who elicits contempt. Students’ discomfort at abandoning comforting myths of a just world was evinced through initial awkward silences and facial expressions. These emotional attachments framed narratives that often justify neglect or distancing. As such, the mapping exercise functioned on a number of levels; first, students were required to analyse discourses; beyond this, they were made aware of their own affective responses to those discourses, especially regarding those that either highlight or obscure their own privilege or complicity; finally the exercise began the slow, difficult work of seeing past these defensive reactions and staying with uncomfortable understandings. In doing so, the exercise invited students to see that dominant narratives are not ‘natural and/or unavoidable’ (Fournier and Grey, 2000: 19) and to engage fully with lives that are easily ignored or condemned.

A fundamental component of a pedagogy of discomfort is maintaining learners’ sense of hope even as their pre-existing worldviews are shattered, but that this hope should not be the naive form founded in comforting myths, but one aware of the work that needs to be done to build justice (Boler, 2004; 2013). This exercise was a deliberate strategy as comfortable knowledge is untroubling. As previously highlighted, the underlying structural causes of poverty and, in particular, those that stem from internalised personal and social discourses, remain underexplored in the classroom. When it comes to incorporating the personal views of students, educators can strive to more actively integrate the personal and social into the process of learning to form points of connection between students’ viewpoints and the curriculum (Forbes and Kaufman, 2008; Kubal et al., 2003; Martinez-Cola et al., 2018).

Representations: Storified Discrimination

Building on their personal and collective discourses, in the second activity, students developed a list of poverty paradoxes, for example, inclusion/exclusion; resistance/conformity; choice/non-choice; pleasure/pain and were subsequently asked to locate media examples (stories and images) of what they believed exemplified and aligned with their pre-identified paradoxes. Our goal with this analytical exercise was to engage learners in critical media inquiry to trace ‘root’ narratives (Andreotti, 2014) or meta-narratives, which form the basis of storified discrimination (Wilson, 2020) and which reinforce negative stereotypes of people who live in poverty. As a pedagogical tool, such paradoxes also illuminate the limitations of binary thinking (Lewis, 2000), problematising the contradictory ways in which poverty is perceived and constructed. As media culture is intrinsically pedagogical in how it constructs, shapes and cultivates individuals and groups (Adams et al., 2007; Giroux, 2000; Kellner and Storay, 2001), we believed it was important to critically explore mis/representations of poverty to surface stigmatising processes. Breaking down meta-narratives in this way disturbed traditional meanings (Giroux, 1988), and it enabled us and the cohort to draw clear distinctions between previously examined academic and policy narratives to highlight how different kinds of representations are shaped by mediatised orientations. Consistent with the critical literacy work of Bryan (2016), our critical media exploration sought to develop student reflexivity and to surface how assumptions are constructed. Questions based on this approach included: what/whose understanding of poverty do they represent? How was this understanding constructed? What are the implications of these claims? (Bryan, 2016: 14). By encouraging students to learn to look critically at messages about the ‘other’ from the media, this practice formed the beginning of a response to the increasing complexity, uncertainty and inequality of poverty in contemporary society (Andreotti, 2014). When students presented only subtle evidence, we were still able to challenge them to be explicit about their assumptions and stereotypes, thereby defusing othering language (Marullo, 1998). A discomforting pedagogy of poverty thus invites students to contest imbued assumptions; in doing so, it reveals to students how their media habits and emotions have become rigid and harmful to themselves and others (Boler, 1999: 185–186). Creating a collective acceptance that some people’s suffering does not matter enables institutions (such as the media) to benefit from harming those people (Butler, 2009). In another class, students were confronted with the stark contrast between the appealing aesthetics and imagery of fast fashion advertising and the abusive conditions under which such garments were made. We used printed and video materials to make the contrast vivid and humanise the suffering. The exercise elucidated how prevailing communication discourses work to disconnect the two contrasting worlds of consumption and production (Stoeckl and Luedicke, 2015). Many students responded with discomfort, questioning their own complicity and responsibility, and exhibiting facial expressions that conveyed guilt, shame or sadness (e.g. lips pressed together, lowering their eyes, sighing). As teacher-observers we became aware of the substantial entrainment of affective energies (Knudsen and Stage, 2015) around difficult emotions, without seeming to settle into the relative comfort of hopelessness or passive empathy.

However, some students decided to push back, offering dispassionate comments delivered with a detached seriousness and voicing the common defence of existing relations of production. We observed this affect spread through the classroom space, expressed as slightly sterner facial expressions and stiffer postures from a number of students. These sentiments accompanied by the idea that it is naive and unhelpful to approach social issues on the basis of emotion, disrupted the flow of affect in the class to an extent, and offered a path for some students to retreat into comfort. However, this effect was limited; most students ‘stay[ed] in discomfort’ (Chadwick, 2021: 557) and as the class moved on to consider a more extreme example of harm (the Rana Plaza factory collapse), they overwhelmingly displayed both anger and an awareness of their own complicity. Indeed, the previous discussion of the value of detached rationality and the benefits of existing arrangements (such as noting that rapidly increasing regulation of factories in poor countries may cost jobs and impoverish workers) may have increased the extent to which students stayed with the discomfort, as it cut off easy escape routes of the form ‘this is horrible, we must fix it with [specific policy]’. In discussions weeks later regarding group assignments that dealt with related material, a few students mentioned unprompted that this discussion had stuck with them and they had modified their buying behaviour accordingly. In this way, we see the value of staying with discomfort as an educational practice for poverty teaching, as students learned not from the closing down of contradictions nor having safe explanations or remedies, but confronting the evidence, both visual and textual. When mediatised representations and storified discrimination that damage groups are examined in this way learners develop critical comprehension between the meaning of words, images and narratives as a prerequisite to achieving clarity of reality and as such discomforting images become key for grappling with social change issues (Boler and Zembylas, 2003; hooks, 1994; Macdeo, 2000).

Vulnerabilities: Community Dis/Connections

Interacting with community-led initiatives produces a space where students are confronted with poverty as a condition of economic inequality. It also presents an opportunity to reconsider the taken-for-granted quality of the structures and practices that, before their exploration of personal/social discourses and mediatised representations, seemed all too normal. Drawing on our research links with the charitable sector, in this final activity students engaged with experiential case studies facilitated by guest speakers representing diverse communities who experience poverty in different ways. By focusing on significant, community-based problems (Harkavy, 2006), our aim was to develop an intentional social connection for students to the realities of poverty (Frank et al., 2020) explored through diverse contexts. First, we examined poverty in the Global South and, in particular, the experience of villagers in the Gambia. The title of this discussion was ‘Shifting sands and different lenses’ and a guest speaker working on an educational initiative, The Gambia Project, provided an ‘outsider’ view of village life and its stark contrast with the UK. This was complemented by the ‘insider’ perspective from a now UK resident from the Gambia. Next, the cohort examined experiential poverty in the UK and our guest speaker from a food-bank charity provided students with client vignettes, testimonies and sample food parcels to explore. When the emotional content of learning is sustained, learning experiences such as these can influence values, dispositions and the characters of those who learn (Schulman, 2005). These tools or artefacts were very powerful in shaping and shifting the mindset of the cohort about the lived experience of poverty. Indeed, it was during this session that students particularly highlighted the impact of the preceding sessions on their overall frames of reference. The idea that people were hungry and unable to consume basic essentials regardless of which country people lived in was shocking for the cohort. Such realisations were visibly upsetting for some students who placed their hands over their mouths, wincing or frowning during the recounting of lived experience vignettes. These uncomfortable feelings offered something valuable to the poverty classes insofar as they enabled students to feel the proximity of inequities (causes and consequences) in more profound and tangible ways. Significantly, such proximity created tension as it disrupted the process of ‘othering’ that had framed students’ previous understandings of poverty. One student remarked in seminar feedback that ‘the poverty seminar was very different and not what expected but since then I have not looked at relative poverty in the UK the same way’. These moments of discomfort introduced texture to the learning process as well as an element of risk such that students became increasingly accepting of the influence normative structures had played in shaping their identification with those experiencing poverty.

In this case, students’ shock at poverty in the UK illustrates how public and media discourses have produced an idea of poverty as necessarily distant and other. Our pedagogical aims were first to challenge this assumption and then to make use of the discomfort that this challenge created. This meant seeking to structure the affective economy of the classroom to be conducive to the students staying with the discomfort. Furthermore, it required thinking about how understandings generated in that particular affective economy might survive when the students leave that space (Ahmed, 2004). This moved us beyond the valorisation of empathy per se (Chadwick, 2021) to consider how discomfort can disrupt one’s position of privilege and unsettle one’s compliance with the conditions that perpetuate injustice. Our group learning activities were designed to be challenging; emotionally and intellectually demanding engagements that asked students to stay in unresolved discomfort and discover valuable concepts with it. In particular, staying with the discomfort caused by an injustice made it harder to maintain ‘wilful ignorance’ of it (Chadwick, 2021: 560).

The transformative value of affective engagement with difficult sociological knowledge of poverty focuses on the ways that affective responses to traumatic representations bring an awareness of a universal shared vulnerability (Zembylas, 2014). Developing awareness was therefore vital to create a sense of affective solidarity and to avoid retreating into comfortable sentimentality to manage the discomfort of considering vulnerability. Rather, we focused on maintaining the affective connection of shared vulnerability, while also being able to critically assess unjust differences in who is vulnerable to what and who (including ourselves) is complicit in making others vulnerable (Zembylas, 2014). Students were next tasked with identifying shared similarities of both cases to destabilise any certainties of oppositional categories such as haves and have nots, absolute and relative poverty as binary ways of thinking about poverty as income distinctions rather than shared experiences (Lesko and Bloom, 1998). Within a pedagogy of discomfort, the use of binaries and stereotypes must be tackled as they take the form of rationalising an array of convictions (Boler and Zembylas, 2003).

Engaging in a collective exploration with others entailed bearing witness to the experiences of diverse communities in poverty. This enabled students to acknowledge when there were important parts of those experiences to which they had habitually paid less attention. This is contrasted with individual self-reflection, which can often be a way of constructing a comfortable simplification of information (Boler, 1999). Such shared inquiry is not possible for students who disconnect from the class in order to preserve their comfort, nor engage in the failure modes of acritical, therapeutic sharing. A pedagogy of discomfort offers some tools for approaching this problem. Instead of encouraging self-serving simplifications of phenomena and one’s relation to those phenomena, it creates a space to feel and engage with discomfort and other emotions that arise in the process of examining cherished assumptions and beliefs (Boler, 1999). This was not an individual learning process, but one where collective engagement was encouraged; involving what Boler (1999: 176) calls ‘collective witnessing’, where students were challenged to invite others’ perspectives, experiences and conditions and engage in collective self-reflection. Building into students’ learning process an understanding that they may experience emotional discomfort and that there is an expectation to sit with that discomfort and learn from it helped them to accept that their accounts were open to different interpretations without taking that as an insult to their understanding or honesty.

Towards a Discomforting Pedagogy of Poverty

Research on the pedagogy of discomfort focuses predominantly on how educators manage discomfort in their classrooms (Porto and Zembylas, 2020). In contrast, we have chosen to focus on students’ engagement with unsettling discourses, representations and vulnerabilities of poverty to illuminate how discomfort can serve as an affective space for cultivating learners’ criticality and reflexivity. Extant sociological approaches to teaching poverty through simulation-based and community service-learning pedagogies (Bramesfeld and Good, 2015; Frank and Rice, 2017; Frank et al., 2020; Layth, 2023; Mayer et al., 2019; Steck et al., 2011), mobilise the experiential with the aim of bringing students closer to distant others. Yet, despite these advancements, efforts are cursory and superficial (Krumer-Nevo et al., 2009), offering a brief empathetic identification through a consumptive focus on others whom students cannot directly help (Boler, 1997). To fully empathise with another person’s internal state, their emotional and cognitive lives, requires a long-term community engagement, which takes place outside the classroom and beyond the confines of standard teaching approaches (Gates and Curwood, 2023; Porto and Zembylas, 2020). The instrumental orientation of simulating economic scarcity and/or visiting community projects facilitates a vicarious engagement with impoverished contexts, but these are insufficient on their own as educational exercises. As difficult sociological knowledge, poverty experiences are rooted in suffering and as such present educators with a challenge to teach and develop meaningful engagement from cohorts who occupy relatively privileged social locations.

The approach we propose contributes a new set of interpretive pedagogic tools with the express aim of destabilising and revealing the underlying structural elements of deprivation, their associated inequalities and entanglements with the belief systems and affects that circulate around these. It encourages a return to the troubles of poverty and an appreciation of discomfort as part of an affective-political educational continuum, which embraces the process of ‘unsettling’ as a necessary route for thinking, feeling and acting differently. If teaching is driven by a concern for ensuring comfort, students are less likely to comprehend undergirding inequalities of the topic at hand (Keddie, 2022). As the disconnection between the academy and the instinct for the common good becomes more pronounced (Sandel, 2021), we also see our approach as useful for (re)humanising difficult sociological topics like poverty to counteract the growth of comfort pedagogies aiming to ‘satisfy’ students or to develop ‘worthwhile’ skillsets characteristic of a neoliberal education (Amsler, 2011; Reckwitz, 2022). A discomforting pedagogy is both uncomfortable in its representation of experiences and an uncomfortable learning process in which the ‘student self’ comes to terms with, negotiates and acknowledges the circumstances of impoverished ‘others’. This requires efforts that encourage students to rethink their own assumptions and to confront the internal obstacles encountered as one’s views are challenged (Boler, 1997: 262). The affective (and embodied) effort needed in this process makes these hard-won understandings deeper and longer lasting (Ahmed, 2017; Chadwick, 2021).

As such, we see value in discomfort as a teaching approach and as a necessary conduit for engaging students in justice-related conversations. A discomforting pedagogy of poverty challenges common assumptions that young people cannot engage in forms of learning that are difficult and decentring (Amsler, 2011). Those who experience poverty do not want our empathy nor our pity, they want justice for their circumstances.

As related constructs, a pedagogy of discomfort and difficult knowledge creates a space for consideration of emotions as natural and inevitable aspects of the sociological teaching and learning process (Bryan, 2016: 26). Our exploratory pedagogic approach has attempted to engage meaningfully and reflexively with matters of poverty in ways that counteract prevailing acritical, neoliberal perspectives. We have chosen to focus on a deeper engagement with the structural realities of poverty, asking students to grapple with contradictory discourses, representations and vulnerabilities. Teaching about issues of social justice is inherently paradoxical, conflictual and emotionally laden (Taylor, 2011). Yet we argue that students cannot develop a critical consciousness if they retreat to a comfortable worldview, presented with mere factual insights about social phenomena. Our reflections reveal how developing understandings of the discourses, representations and vulnerabilities of poverty helps students avoid such retreat by disrupting false but comforting understandings of how they fit within society (Boler, 1999). A discomforting pedagogy of poverty is not about making learning painful (Martinez-Cola et al., 2018) but about making it possible to experience and learn from discomfort productively and safely through an ethos of care, respect and responsiveness (Miller, 2023). Together with our students, we have taken up this challenge to explore, contest, sit with and overturn stigmatising views of those who experience deprivation. We suggest that this deeper level of engagement with the structural realities of poverty offers educators and learners an alternative and meaningful pathway for making sense of poverty as difficult sociological knowledge.

Footnotes

Funding

As a member of NIPE, the second author is grateful for the support received from National Funds through the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), within the project UID/03182, Centre for Research in Economics and Management/University of Minho.

ORCID iDs

Martina Hutton

Teresa Heath

Martina Hutton is a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on consumer poverty and the experiences of social-material exclusion and deprivation related to gender, hunger and post-prison experiences. Actively partnering with stakeholders and communities on these issues, her methodological expertise is social justice research, critical participatory action approaches and alternative empirical representations of marginality. She has published widely on these issues including in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Marketing Theory and Consumption Markets & Culture.

Teresa Heath is an Associate Professor at the University of Minho and holds the position of Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham. Her research and teaching focus is on transformative marketing and education and their intersection with sustainability, ethics and consumption. Teresa advocates critical pedagogies in management that can inform responsible practice. Her work has been published widely, including in the Journal of Business Ethics, Marketing Theory and Management Learning. Teresa is also a member of the Education Committee of the Academy of Marketing and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

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