The Poverty of Nations

Conventionally, poverty is often represented as a lack of resources, but it is much more than that. A considerable amount of work has been done in recent years to establish a view of poverty as a complex, multi-dimensional set of experiences. The poverty of nations goes further still. The nature of poverty is constituted by social relationships - relationships such as low status, social exclusion, insecurity and lack of rights. The relational elements of poverty tell us what poverty really means – what poverty consists of, what poor people are experiencing, and what kind of problems there are to be addressed. The more emphasis that we put on such relationships as elements of poverty, the more difficult it becomes to suppose either that poverty is primarily a matter of resources, or that poverty in rich countries means something fundamentally different from poverty in poor countries. The book considers how poverty manifests itself in rich and poor countries, and how those countries can respond to poverty as a relational issue.

Design, power and colonisation: decolonial and anti-oppressive explorations on three approaches for Design for Sustainability

Our contemporary world is organized in a modern/colonial structure. As people, professions and practices engage in cross-country Design for Sustainability (DfS), projects have the potential of sustaining or changing modern/colonial power structures. In such project relations, good intentions in working for sustainability do not directly result in liberation from modern/colonial power structures. In this paper we introduce three approaches in DfS that deal with power relations. Using a Freirean (1970) decolonial perspective, we analyse these approaches to see how they can inform DfS towards being decolonial and anti-oppressive. We conclude that steering DfS to become decolonial or colonizing is a relational issue based on the interplay between the designers’ position in the modern/colonial structure, the design approach chosen, the place and the people involved in DfS. Hence, a continuous critical reflexive practice is needed in order to prevent DfS from becoming yet another colonial tool.

Reconceptualising sleep: Relational principles inside and outside the pram

This article explores sleep among kindergarten infants and toddlers. Although the collective order of sleep in kindergarten makes it a relational issue, the search here is for relations that extend beyond human actors and beyond the idea of the pram as a sleep container used by a sleeping subject. Here, sleep is seen as entangled with bodies and prams; it has a rhythm and a tempo, as well as the power to challenge the capitalist call for productivity. The article addresses sleep in terms of spatial configurations and contextualises it within a web of political relations rather than as a leftover of life. Informed by Foucault’s notions of heterotopia, the article characterises sleep as a world within a world, drawing attention to relational principles and material-discursive spaces that are characterised as ‘different’, on the understanding that sleep is not an intermission from life or relationships. Moving beyond the conceptualisation of sleep as a health and medical issue, it is reframed as embodied and embedded, enabling exploration of sleep in kindergarten as relational.

Re-Thinking Youth Suicide: Language, Culture, and Power

In this article we set out the context and provide the theoretical resources for re-thinking youth suicide as a sociocultural, political, and relational issue. Drawing on recent high profile youth suicides as reference points, we aim to illuminate some of the complex relational processes and sociopolitical conditions that may make some lives more ‘unlivable’ than others. We adopt a social constructionist perspective to argue that experiences of distress, understandings of self, and knowledge about suicide are not stable and objective entities awaiting discovery. Rather, they are brought into being through historically and culturally specific social practices, including language, discourse and relations of power. We then turn to more recently developed cultural frameworks and social justice orientations as a way of bringing the much neglected topics of culture and power into the scholarly conversation about youth suicide. We conclude by exploring some of the implications for practice and policy that might follow from these reformulations.