This project will develop a research collaboration network whose members will generate conceptual and methodological innovations to advance poverty research and solutions. The Relational Poverty Network (RPN) will complement and extend poverty research with a relational conceptualization of poverty, which theorizes poverty as produced and addressed by economic, political, and cultural relationships among social groups. Poverty researchers long have noted the potential of relational poverty approaches as a basis for innovative and viable new analytic tools, yet RPN researchers have identified significant conceptual and methodological challenges to realizing this potential. Because relational poverty research generally has been comprised of isolated, singular case studies, "scaling up" relational poverty analysis for larger, cross-disciplinary, and international comparisons introduces a series of fundamental conceptual and measurement challenges. Relational approaches to poverty introduce new objects of study, such as social relations or cultural attitudes toward poverty that are difficult to identify within existing poverty data or to compare across national contexts. Furthermore; building meaningful comparison across case studies has been difficult in the absence of closely coordinated research designs and methods. The RPN will address these challenges by: (1) developing concepts that operationalize relational poverty in ways that can be compared across international empirically grounded research; (2) building descriptive metadata, including quantitative and qualitative sources, to support comparative analysis across research cases as well as synthesis of research findings from individual projects; (3) developing a common research design for robust mixed-methods research and "many sites-to-many sites" comparisons; and (4) catalyzing debate and discovery across mainstream and relational poverty research scholars. The core group of 60 social scientists at 30 institutions from which the RPN will grow is cross-disciplinary, including human geographers, sociologists, historians, economists, anthropologists, and philosophers working in the U.S., Argentina, South Africa, India, Canada, and Thailand. The RPN's conceptual and methodological innovations will be realized through four annual workshops conducted at U.S.-based poverty research centers. These workshops will involve RPN participants as well as researchers and practitioners from the sites where the workshops are held. RPN members will develop collaborative grant proposals to carry out their scientific activities. They will co-author research papers, and they will develop publically available educational materials for teaching about relational poverty approaches in multiple disciplinary contexts.
The RPN will have a variety of intellectual and broad impacts. The comparative relational poverty concepts, descriptive metadata, and in-common research design developed by the network will expand the impact of relational approaches within poverty research. The network will seek to attract a broad and diverse range of mainstream and relational poverty researchers into a social science infrastructure. Network members will build a range of other pathways to broaden the scope and intellectual impact of the RPN, including public scholarship, including public talks, articles in popular media, and online discussion forums. They also will engage in a range of education activities, such as innovative classroom activities, service-learning pedagogies, and graduate webinars. The majority of network members will be teacher-scholars working at public universities who will recruit a diverse range of students through regularly taught classes for direct involvement in the network. The RPN will disseminate research and educational resources broadly, both through its own website, publications, and meetings as well as in coordination with seven U.S. poverty centers and the Comparative Research on Poverty Program (CROP), a program of the International Social Science Council (ISSC) at UNESCO.
