Poverty is generally defined as a lack of material resources. However, the relationships that poor people have with their possessions are not just about deprivation. Material things play a positive role in the lives of poor people: they help people to build social relationships, address inequalities, and fulfill emotional needs. In this book, anthropologist Erin Taylor explores how residents of a squatter settlement in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, use their material resources creatively to solve everyday problems and, over a few decades, radically transform the community. Their struggles show how these everyday engagements with materiality, rather than more dramatic efforts, generate social change and build futures.

Material Transgressions reveals how Romantic-era authors think outside of historical and theoretical ideologies that reiterate notions of sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. The essays gathered here examine how Romantic writers rethink materiality, especially the subject-object relationship, in order to challenge the tenets of Enlightenment and the culture of sensibility that privileged the hegemony of the speaking and feeling lyric subject and to undo supposedly invariable matter, and representations of it, that limited their writing, agency, knowledge, and even being. In this volume, the idea of transgression serves as a flexible and capacious discursive and material movement that braids together fluid forms of affect, embodiment, and textuality. The texts explored offer alternative understandings of materiality that move beyond concepts that fix gendered bodies and intellectual capacities, whether human or textual, idea or thing. They enact processes – assemblages, ghost dances, pack mentality, reiterative writing, shapeshifting, multi-voiced choric oralities – that redefine restrictive structures in order to craft alternative modes of being in the world that can help us to reimagine materiality both in the Romantic period and now. Such dynamism not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils textualities, affects, figurations, and linguistic movements that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach. List of contributors: Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, Suzanne L. Barnett, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Michael Gamer, Katrina O’Loughlin, Emily J. Dolive, Holly Gallagher, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Mary Beth Tegan, Mark Lounibos, Sonia Hofkosh, David Sigler, Chris Washington, Donelle Ruwe, Mark Lussier.

Harnessing the energy of provocative theories generated by recent understandings of the human body, the natural world, and the material world, Material Feminisms presents an entirely new way for feminists to conceive of the question of materiality. In lively and timely essays, an international group of feminist thinkers challenges the assumptions and norms that have previously defined studies about the body. These wide-ranging essays grapple with topics such as the material reality of race, the significance of sexual difference, the impact of disability experience, and the complex interaction between nature and culture in traumatic events such as Hurricane Katrina. By insisting on the importance of materiality, this volume breaks new ground in philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, science studies, and other fields where the body and nature collide.

Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones offers a detailed ethnographic and anthropological examination of the social, cultural, linguistic and material aspects of cell phones. With contributions from an international range of established and emerging scholars, this is a truly global collection with rural and urban examples from communities across the Global North and South. Linking the use of cell phones to contemporary discussions about representation, mediation and subjectivity, the book investigates how this increasingly ubiquitous technology challenges the boundaries of privacy and selfhood, raising new questions about how we communicate.

Poverty in fifth- and fourth-century BCE Athens was a markedly different concept to that with which we are familiar today. Reflecting contemporary ideas about labour, leisure, and good citizenship, the 'poor' were considered to be not only those who were destitute, or those who were living at the borders of subsistence, but also those who were moderately well-off but had to work for a living. Defined in this way, this group covered around 99 per cent of the population of Athens. This conception of penia (poverty) was also ideologically charged: the poor were contrasted with the rich and found, for the most part, to be both materially and morally deficient. Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being sets out to rethink what it meant to be poor in a world where this was understood as the need to work for a living, exploring the discourses that constructed poverty as something to fear and linking them with experiences of penia among different social groups in Athens. Drawing on current research into and debates around poverty within the social sciences, it provides a critical reassessment of poverty in democratic Athens and argues that it need not necessarily be seen in terms of these elitist ideological categories, nor indeed solely as an economic condition (the state of having no wealth), but that it should also be understood in terms of social relations, capabilities, and well-being. In developing a framework to analyse the complexities of poverty so conceived and exploring the discourses that shaped it, the volume reframes poverty as being dynamic and multidimensional, and provides a valuable insight into what the poor in Athens - men and women, citizen and non-citizen, slave and free - were able to do or to be.

With more than 450,000 copies in print, When Helping Hurts is a paradigm-forming contemporary classic on the subject of poverty alleviation. Poverty is much more than simply a lack of material resources, and it takes much more than donations and handouts to solve it. When Helping Hurts shows how some alleviation efforts, failing to consider the complexities of poverty, have actually (and unintentionally) done more harm than good. But it looks ahead. It encourages us to see the dignity in everyone, to empower the materially poor, and to know that we are all uniquely needy—and that God in the gospel is reconciling all things to himself. Focusing on both North American and Majority World contexts, When Helping Hurts provides proven strategies for effective poverty alleviation, catalyzing the idea that sustainable change comes not from the outside in, but from the inside out.

Good intentions are not enough. When Helping Hurts offers a different framework for thinking about poverty and its alleviation. Rather than simply defining it as a lack of material things, the book addresses the roots of the issue: broken relationships with God, self, others, and the rest of creation. Online videos included. Join together as a class or small group to explore how to help the poor without hurting them. The Small Group Experience, an ideal training resource for small groups, Sunday school classes, and parachurch and nonprofit ministries, utilizes free online video lessons to unpack the basic principles of poverty alleviation in an accessible way. Filmed in the U.S. and abroad, each of the six lessons includes discussion questions, application exercises, and materials for further learning. Join the many ministries and churches that are already implementing these ideas, transforming their culture of poverty alleviation, and moving toward helping the poor without hurting them.