Discourse & Society

Recent global statistics reveal a concerning increase in extreme poverty, exacerbated by social and political upheavals such as the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crises. Despite poverty being a well-established research topic in various fields, linguistic analyses remain scant. This special issue on the discourses of poverty, of which this introduction is a part, explores the multifaceted nature of poverty through a discourse analytical lens, highlighting the complexity and diversity of how poverty is experienced across different contexts. The contributions within this issue demonstrate how discourse shapes public understanding, policy formulation, and societal attitudes towards poverty, ultimately advocating for a more inclusive approach that amplifies marginalised voices. By examining the language surrounding poverty and meaningfully engaging with individuals who have experienced it, this issue calls for more critical linguistic research to challenge well-established ideologies about poverty. It also aims to address the assumptions researchers make about what poverty is, what it feels like, who it affects, and how it can be eradicated, thereby hopefully contributing, albeit in a small way, to fostering social change.

This paper presents a framing analysis of 12 editions of The Big Issue published in the last 3 months of 2023. The study employs framing analysis to investigate the language used by the magazine to report on poverty and homelessness. The paper analyses the ‘My Pitch’ column which represents the voice of the often-homeless vendors who sell the magazine. Using Entman’s approach to framing we analyse how individuals with lived experience of poverty and homelessness define the causes and solutions to poverty and homelessness. Furthermore, the paper offers a critical examination of the claims of the magazine to provide a platform for marginalised voices. We find that the magazine offers a platform for people with lived experience of poverty and/or homelessness to have their voices heard, although the My Pitch column offers limited space to inform the magazine’s readers of the wider context of homelessness. It also reinforces social enterprise solutions to poverty and homelessness. This framing avoids discussing shortfalls in the UK welfare system although the narrative logic of these profiles offers latent evidence of welfare dysfunction.

Drawing upon data from Changing Realities, an online participatory research project collected between September-October 2022 and March-April 2023, this article generates new knowledge on the lived experiences of low-income families in the UK during this turbulent political period and particularly through the (ongoing) cost-of-living crisis. Utilising the work of Wright and McIntosh, we articulate the ‘shared typical’ discernible of lived experiences of life on a low income during this tumultuous period. Findings provide new insights into how participants describe themselves as part of a collective, comprising parents and carers who shared similar experiences of life on a low income. However, in contrast they differentiated between themselves and those in positions of power and disconnected from their reality. In our discussion, we examine the implications of this and consider the broader understandings and realisations of poverty.

This paper explores the construction of different understandings of poverty in The Times newspaper (1900–2009). Using corpus-based discourse analysis, it examines the premodification of poverty with different nouns. Rising to prominence from the 1950s onwards, the resulting compound nouns, including world poverty and child poverty, facilitate the discursive construction of different types of poverty as distinct entities. Through close reading of concordance lines and collocate analysis, the paper investigates how these categories are presented as qualitatively similar/different and discusses how such representations reflect broader ideological contexts in the UK.

Policymaking is storytelling; through stories, the policymaker learns of the problem, and based on these stories, the policymaker formulates a solution. In our earlier study of discussions about sexual exploitation of children in the context of travel and tourism (SECTT) in the Dutch House of Representatives, we suggest that the central story in these discussions revolves around ‘crime’ and law enforcement. Despite evidence on the links between poverty and SECTT, few policy suggestions target this risk factor. In our current study, we piece together the story told about the role of poverty in SECTT in Dutch House of Representatives debates, letters and documents from 1995 to 2020 using Faircloughian CDA enhanced with an analysis of transitivity. Our findings indicate that initially, poverty was indeed discussed as a key cause of SECTT. SECTT was understood as a fundamentally commercial practice through which children and their families aim to escape that poverty. Over time, however, the agency attributed to these families diminishes and focus shifts to (the actions of) abusers and exploiters. This development appears to be connected to shifting political orientations of consecutive Dutch government coalitions.

Poverty talk has far-reaching effects at personal and society level. Overwhelmingly negative narratives undermine mental health of people in poverty and forces them in a position to cope with, resist and contradict the fallacious stereotypes that are spread about them. Narratives are not shaped in a vacuum, nor are they value neutral. Power is at the heart of poverty discourse, with words carefully curated to create and reinforce societal hierarchies and inequalities. Building on the contributions in this special issue, this conclusion therefore argues that studies of poverty discourse cannot confine themselves to the analytical but must also engage with the political.

In this article, we examine how eighty-one participants in the Finnish Basic Income Experiment discursively construct and make sense of their own and others’ poverty in face-to-face interviews. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we identified three discursive strategies the interviewees use to engage with and challenge culturally dominant poverty discourses. First, poverty was constructed as a tragic experience attributed to external causes beyond individual control, such as precarious labour markets and governmental policies. Second, poverty was managed discursively through explicit and implicit moral judgements about other welfare recipients, which also highlighted the speakers’ own moral values regarding responsibility and self-sufficiency. Third, some interviewees discursively constructed their low-income status as a personal and deliberate choice to live an intentionally modest, sustainable or ‘deviant’ lifestyle. Overall, our results reveal how ideologically controversial sociopolitical experiments create a particular argumentative context in which poverty talk is constructed.