"The Forgotten Half" - Collaborative Research on Child Poverty

This working conference will bring together a group of committed scholars who share a common interest in the circumstances of children in the Global South.

Whatever way poverty is conceptualized, focusing on poverty is also helpful for acting on the deeper, underlying causality of human deprivations.  Do children die due to diarrhea or due to poverty? Do they miss school due to not having shoes or due to poverty? By addressing a single, common cause that underlies many manifestations of deprivation, an antipoverty strategy can produce multiple benefits (Fajth and Holland, 2007: 4).

Almost half of the 2.2 billion children living in the world today can be defined as living in poverty.  While the problem is worse in some regions than others, it is universal and too often neglected in popular, political and academic discussions of poverty (Minujin et al. 2005).  The detrimental effects of poverty accumulate as children age into adulthood and go on to become the poor parents of the next generation (Young Lives 2006).  Young people who grow up in poor households are more likely to work as children, drop out of primary school (if attend at all), engage in risky sexual behavior, marry and bear children early, and have a more difficult time finding stable and remunerative employment as adults (Lloyd 2005).  Importantly, the condition of children not only shapes their own futures but that of the places they live.
  
Through presentations of the working groups own work and interests, reflection on and discussion of background material concerning the contours of child poverty, a critical assessment of the state of research on child poverty, and the building of an inventory of possible funding agencies, the intent of this two-day workshop will be to identify gaps in the research literature, brainstorm about research designs that could be proposed to close those gaps, and catalyze one or more research teams to develop grant proposals for new research on child poverty.

Participants
-Martín Benavides, Excecutive Director, Grupo de Análisis para el Desarrollo (GRADE), Peru
-Francis Dodoo, College of Liberal Arts Research Professor andProfessor of Sociology and Demography, Penn State
-Mrs. Faustina Frempong-Ainguah, Lecturer, Regional Institute for Population Studies, Ghana
-Melissa Hardy, Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family Studies and Sociology, Penn State
-John Iceland, Professor of Sociology and Demography, Penn State
-Leif Jensen, Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography, Penn State
-Sebastián J. Lipina, Professor of Social Vulnerability and Cognitive Development, Universidad Nacional de San Martin (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, Argentina
-Usha Nayar, Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. 
Dr. Philomena Nyarko, Senior Lecturer, Regional Institute for Population Studies, Ghana
-Kevin Thomas, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies, Sociology, and Demography, Penn State
-Jenny Trinitapoli, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Demography, Penn State