Inequality Knowledge

Inequality Knowledge
Author: Felix Römer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2023-11-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3111317277

Poverty and inequality have pervaded British society to this day, but this has not always been self-evident to contemporaries – popular understandings have depended on existing knowledge. Inequality Knowledge provides the first detailed history of the numbers about the gap between rich and poor. It shows how they were produced, used, and suppressed at times, and how activists, scientists, and journalists eventually wrestled control over the figures from the state. The book traces the making and the politics of statistical knowledge about economic inequality in the United Kingdom from the post-war era to the 1990s. What kind of knowledge was available to contemporaries about socio-economic disparities in Britain and how they evolved over time? How was this knowledge produced and by whom? What did policy makers and civil servants know about the extent of poverty and inequality in British society and to what extent did they take the distributional impact of their social and fiscal policies into account? Far from just a technical matter, inequality knowledge had far-reaching implications for key debates and the wider political culture in contemporary Britain. Historicizing inequality knowledge speaks to a long tradition of historical research about social class divisions and cultural representations of economic disparities in twentieth-century Britain.

Science and Social Inequality

Science and Social Inequality
Author: Sandra Harding
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2023-12-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252047095

In Science and Social Inequality, Sandra Harding makes the provocative argument that the philosophy and practices of today's Western science, contrary to its Enlightenment mission, work to insure that more science will only worsen existing gaps between the best and worst off around the world. She defends this claim by exposing the ways that hierarchical social formations in modern Western sciences encode antidemocratic principles and practices, particularly in terms of their services to militarism, the impoverishment and alienation of labor, Western expansion, and environmental destruction. The essays in this collection--drawing on feminist, multicultural, and postcolonial studies--propose ways to reconceptualize the sciences in the global social order. At issue here are not only social justice and environmental issues but also the accuracy and comprehensiveness of our understandings of natural and social worlds. The inadvertent complicity of the sciences with antidemocratic projects obscures natural and social realities and thus blocks the growth of scientific knowledge. Scientists, policy makers, social justice movements and the consumers of scientific products (that is, the rest of us) can work together and separately to improve this situation.

Poverty Knowledge

Poverty Knowledge
Author: Alice O'Connor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780691102559

Alice O'Connor here chronicles the transformation in the study of poverty from a reform-minded inquiry into the political economy of industrial capitalism to the detached, highly technical 1990s analysis of the demographic and behavioural characteristics of the poor. "Poverty Knowledge" is a comprehensive historical account of the thinking behind these very different views of "the poverty problem". It is a century-spanning inquiry into the politics, institutions, ideologies, and social science that shaped poverty research and policy.

Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South

Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South
Author: Márton Demeter
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2020-11-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9783030527006

This book investigates and critically interprets the underrepresentation of the global South in global knowledge production. The author analyses the serious bias towards scholars and institutions from this region: he argues that this phenomenon causes serious disadvantages not only for authors and institutions, but global science as well by impeding the flow of fresh, innovative scholarship. This book uses a combination of field theory and world-systems analysis to explain the motives and dynamics behind the geopolitical and societal inequalities in the system of global knowledge production. Subsequently, the author offers several solutions by which these inequalities could be reduced, or even eliminated. This book will be of interest and value to scholars of knowledge inequalities, and knowledge production in the global South. “Márton Demeter’s monograph invokes rich anecdotal, empirical and scientometric evidence to delineate the contours of a world system that preserves the dominance of Western knowledge and scholars and the westernisation or peripheralisation of the rest – a system defined by geopolitical and material inequalities, socio-economic class differences, institutional elitism and publishing biases. Demeter’s work counters narratives that present academia as meritocratic and that justify disparities in world publications on the basis of pure rigour, exposing rather norms and values that perpetuate a western elitist system and peripheralise those who happen to lack this cultural capital. Demeter’s work adds to an expanding field of research documenting how Anglophone standards and biases in journal indexing, peer review and editorial board recruitment marginalise consistently the Global South. His practical and concrete suggestions to subvert this system of horizontal and vertical inequalities could not be timelier and provides momentum to decolonisation movements in higher education across the world.” —Dr Romina Istratii, SOAS University of London, UK “Márton Demeter is a scholar dedicated to revealing the inequality in academic publishing and a strong advocate for scholars from the Global South. This book is an epitome of his effort on this cause. Demeter utilizes his wealth of data including authorships, citations, journal publishers, editorial review board compositions, the reviewers and the editors of journals as strong evidence of inequality with his three-dimensional model of academic stratification. This book is a must-read for scholars both in the Global North and the Global South to reflect on the current state of academic knowledge gatekeeping and production. It will spark a dialogue between scholars to address the dominance of the Global North especially in the field of communication.” —Professor Louisa Ha, Bowling Green State University, USA “Márton Demeter’s analysis and critique of the unequal structure of global knowledge production is a powerful contribution to the global justice movement with dramatic implications for what academics in both the Global North and the Global South can do to help science and the humanities live up to their claims of meritocracy and universality. Demeter employs a useful critical combination of the world-systems perspective and Bourdieusian field theory to organize the results of his careful and sophisticated empirical studies of global knowledge production. He is an intrepid protagonist of a more egalitarian human future.” —Professor Christopher Chase-Dunn, University of California, Riverside, USA

Inequalities of the World

Inequalities of the World
Author: Göran Therborn
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781844670154

A groundbreaking exploration of contemporary global inequality by leading scholars from across the world.

Handbook on Poverty + Inequality

Handbook on Poverty + Inequality
Author: Jonathan Haughton
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2009-03-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0821376144

For anyone wanting to learn, in practical terms, how to measure, describe, monitor, evaluate, and analyze poverty, this Handbook is the place to start. It is designed to be accessible to people with a university-level background in science or the social sciences. It is an invaluable tool for policy analysts, researchers, college students, and government officials working on policy issues related to poverty and inequality.

Histories of Global Inequality

Histories of Global Inequality
Author: Christian Olaf Christiansen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 303019163X

This book argues that inequality is not just about numbers, but is also about lived, historical experience. It supplements economic research and offers a comprehensive stocktaking of existing thinking on global inequality and its historical development. The book is interdisciplinary, drawing upon regional and national perspectives from around the world while seeking to capture the multidimensionality and multi-causality of global inequalities. Grappling with what economics offers – as well as its blind spots – the study focuses on some of today’s most relevant and pressing themes: discrimination and human rights, defences and critiques of inequality in history, decolonization, international organizations, gender theory, the history of quantification of inequality and the history of economic thought. The historical case studies featured respond to the need for wider historical research and to calls to examine global inequality in a more holistic manner. The Introduction 'Chapter 1 Histories of Global Inequality: Introduction' is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

The Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities

The Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities
Author: Mary Romero
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1405152060

The Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities is afirst-rate collection of social science scholarship oninequalities, emphasizing race, ethnicity, class, gender,sexuality, age, and nationality. Highlights themes that represent the scope and range oftheoretical orientations, contemporary emphases, and emergingtopics in the field of social inequalities. Gives special attention to debates in the field, developingtrends and directions, and interdisciplinary influences in thestudy of social inequalities. Includes an editorial introduction and suggestions for furtherreading.

Inequality

Inequality
Author: Carles Lalueza-Fox
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2022-02-08
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262369168

How genomics reveals deep histories of inequality, going back many thousands of years. Inequality is an urgent global concern, with pundits, politicians, academics, and best-selling books all taking up its causes and consequences. In Inequality, Carles Lalueza-Fox offers an entirely new perspective on the subject, examining the genetic marks left by inequality on humans throughout history. Lalueza-Fox describes genetic studies, made possible by novel DNA sequencing technologies, that reveal layers of inequality in past societies, manifested in patterns of migration, social structures, and funerary practices. Through their DNA, ancient skeletons have much to tell us, yielding anonymous stories of inequality, bias, and suffering. Lalueza-Fox, a leader in paleogenomics, offers the deep history of inequality. He explores the ancestral shifts associated with migration and describes the gender bias unearthed in these migrations—the brutal sexual asymmetries, for example, between male European explorers and the women of Latin America that are revealed by DNA analysis. He considers social structures, and the evidence that high social standing was inherited—the ancient world was not a meritocracy. He untangles social and genetic factors to consider whether wealth is an advantage in reproduction, showing why we are more likely to be descended from a king than a peasant. And he explores the effects of ancient inequality on the human gene pool. Marshaling a range of evidence, Lalueza-Fox shows that understanding past inequalities is key to understanding present ones.