'The New Faces of Poverty'
A feature section of the most recent issue of Barcelona Metropolis deals with new parameters of poverty in the developed world. Under the direction of Professors Luis Enrique Alonso and Alicia García Ruiz, a dozen writers unveil the new faces of poverty and its challenges.
Alonso and Ruiz have invited the contributors to take a genetically and methodologically plural approach to study poverty, and to try to contextualise and extend traditional quantitative indicators with ethnographic, historical and qualitative approaches.
The articles gathered for Barcelona Metropolis make it quite clear that poverty is not just a state of deprivation; it is a complex play of symbolic, labelled attributes and practical arguments established by real social subjects. The aim is to avoid limiting the study of poverty to a description of accursed social players who are always defined by what they lack ('paperless', 'lawless', 'urban pariahs', etc.), as this tends to reinforce the stigma and continues to increase the prophecy of their abnormality.
Barcelona Metropolis is an initiative promoted by the City Council of Barcelona, including a magazine of urban information and urban thought, devoted to debate about the city and people living in it. The director is the Professor of Philosophy Manuel Cruz.