Re-Politicising Poverty: Relational Re-conceptualisations of Impoverishment

This collection of essays extends cross-disciplinary conversations between co-authors that began as part of a podcast series by the Relational Poverty Network, “New Poverty Politics for Changing Times”. The authors engage impoverishment as a relation, as an outcome of intersecting political projects of racialised oppression, political-economic injustice and socio-legal control. Across various sites, the collection’s essays trace poverty politics, providing conjunctural and multi-scalar analyses that illuminate the operations of power in producing impoverishment. They direct our attention beyond topics typically associated with poverty studies, showing how processes such as bordering, migrant illegality, racial capitalism and caring community politics intersect in poverty politics today. Our introductory essay argues for a relational poverty analysis that addresses the entanglements of cultural politics, those that produce classificatory schemes, together with political-economic processes that produce various forms of poverty politics in the current conjuncture. We chart thinkable and unthinkable poverty politics across the collection’s essays in order to analyse current hegemonic formations of poverty governance as well as alternative imaginations and actions that are resisting and reworking relations of impoverishment. Ultimately, this collection expands vocabularies and analytical repertoires for understanding the ongoing ways in which impoverishment is produced and resisted, positing relationality as key to re-politicising poverty towards a more just future.     

Evaluating Crash Risk in Urban Areas Based on Vehicle and Pedestrian Modeling

This article presents a method for investigating the spatial distribution of vehicle and pedestrian traffic crashes relative to the volume of vehicle and pedestrian movement in urban areas. This method consists of two phases. First, vehicle and pedestrian traffic volumes on the street network are modeled using a space syntax configurational analysis of the network, land use data, and observed traffic data. Second, crash prediction models are fitted to the traffic crash data, using negative binomial regression models and based on traffic volume estimates and street segment lengths. The method was applied in two areas in Tel Aviv, Israel, which differ in their morphological and traffic characteristics. The case‐studies illustrated the method's capability in identifying hazardous locations on the network and examining relative crash risks. The analysis shows that an increase in vehicle or pedestrian traffic volume tends to be associated with a decrease in relative crash risk. Moreover, the spatial patterns of relative crash risks are associated with the design characteristics of urban space: areas characterized by dense street networks encourage more walking, and are generally safer for pedestrians, while those with longer street segments encourage more driving, are less safe for pedestrians, but safer for vehicles.     

‘My Dog is My Home’: multispecies care and poverty politics in Los Angeles,California and Austin,Texas

My Dog is My Home is an art activist project in Los Angeles dedicated to sharing testimonies about the redemptive bonds of care and love between homeless persons and their canine companions. These testimonies politicize the structural violence and oppressive norms about propertied citizenship and notions of home that operate to render homeless human and animal lives disposable and ungrievable. Informed by the experts’ testimonies on multispecies homelessness and an engagement with feminist care theory, we bring relational poverty studies into conversation with critical animal studies to reject this framing of homeless lives as disposable and to trouble the idea of property as the fundamental basis for value. We problematize these notions by highlighting the insights gained from witnessing the entangled empathetic relationships forged between homeless humans and dogs. These relationships are not only a window into the political economic material conditions and discourses that reproduce homelessness and the animal-as-property. We conclude that studying these bonds offers a collective politics of multispecies mutuality, care, and love.     

Russian timber industry in the 1920s: on the short history of Russnorvegoles

After the Russian Revolution, with civil war and interventions, war communism (1918–1921) led to a period of great economic difficulties in Russia. The New Economic Policy was the solution, and concessions offered to Western business interests were a part of it. In the timber industry of the 1920s, the jointly Western and Soviet controlled company Russnorvegoles was an important concession. The majority of the Western interests were Norwegian, and the company was registered as a Norwegian limited liability company with seat in Oslo. The four-and-a-half-year history, involving Western interests in the operations of Russnorvegoles, is both interesting and dramatic. Profitability was undermined, and intricate currency arrangements played a significant role during the last eighteen months in which Western interests were involved. The prominent Norwegian fascist politicians Quisling and Prytz were both involved, and the latter emerged a wealthy man. Living on his means for some years following 1928, he contributed financially to the formation in 1933 of a Norwegian Nazi party (Nasjonal Samling/National Reunion). This dimension of Norwegian political history demonstrates the role that Russnorvegoles played beyond the timber industry.     

Dental Pathology,Trauma and Attrition in a Zambian Iron Age Sample: A Macroscopic and Radiographic Investigation

Using morphological and radiographic methods, we analysed the dentitions of 24 individuals from Ingombe Ilede and Isamu Pati Zambian Iron Age archaeological sites. In this study, we determined the frequency and distribution of attrition, pathological conditions and dental trauma. This research also presents the first view of dental health for an Iron Age population in southern Africa. In total, 482 teeth were available for this study with 287 teeth missing, where 50 of these were lost antemortem and one individual had an erupted supernumerary first mandibular incisor. With the use of radiography and morphology, 21.5% (104/482) of the analysed teeth had at least one pathological condition or evidence of dental trauma. Some interesting dental aspects found and discussed in this paper are linear enamel hypoplastic lesions, radicular resorption, periapical lesions, fractures, dental modification and carious lesions. Many of these features were diagnosed with radiography, and this was especially important for those found below the cemento‐enamel junction (p = 0.0202) that are less obvious with macroscopic investigation alone. Additionally, the quantity and direction of dental attrition was studied. There were observed sex differences with the direction of wear, likely representing a sex‐specific cultural practice of using teeth as tools. Overall, the results show that this sample suffered relatively little from dental problems, and many of those observed features were associated with the traumatic procedure of dental modification, whereas others were age and diet‐related. Additionally, with the use of radiography, rare dental fractures and other features were diagnosed; these results demonstrate the requirement for its application in dental studies on archaeological assemblages. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.