The arts of poverty politics: Real Change

Abstract

This paper explores disruptive poverty politics arising from creative activisms that challenge homelessness/impoverishment. We analyze forms and potentials of creative activisms that challenge hegemonic meanings and practices around impoverishment. Bringing together geographers’ work on creative activisms, geographies of art, and the dialectics of thinkable and unthinkable poverty politics; we analyze activism by Real Change, a Seattle economic and racial justice organization confronting the city’s shelter crisis. We argue that creative poverty activism produces performative encounters that challenge exclusionary space-making and create political connections between people experiencing poverty and those who are not. Using portraiture and public art/performance, activists disrupt normative sights, practices, and socio-spatial relations on which poverty knowledge rests in public spaces. These interventions re-script spaces of privilege produced through capitalist relations of dispossession and exclusion, and the ideological projects that undergird them. Disruptive poverty politics create encounters across socio-spatial difference that challenge privileged subjects, raise new voices, and create previously unimaginable political forms. Our analysis extends prior work on visual poverty politics that has theorized the reproduction of hegemonic poverty politics (of difference, blame, stigma, individualized causes) through representational practices. We extend relational poverty analysis into the realm of the visual, performative, and creative, revealing new sites, forms, and possibilities of disruptive poverty politics.

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