Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
INTRODUCTION
This section of the topic focuses on people's everyday lives in the global
South and helps to contextualize many of the theoretical and empirical
issues discussed in the previous chapters. Drawing on grounded
research from a range of contexts, we explore how people's lives are
entwined with processes of development, culture and inequality from
the micro- to the macro-levels. Placing people's everyday lives at the
centre brings questions of poverty, inequality and difference sharply
into focus. Such an approach clearly reveals the multidimensional
nature of poverty and the ways this is linked to axes of social difference
and inequality, including gender, age, disability and ill health, sexual-
ity, race and ethnicity among other factors. The concept of intersection-
ality, which emerged from feminists' engagement with questions of
difference, is particularly useful in exploring the ways that a range of
markers of social difference intersect and interact throughout the life-
course (Hopkins and Pain, 2007). Each of the chapters in this section
takes a different dimension of social difference as its starting point:
gender, childhood and youth, disability and ill health, sexualities, and
ageing. However, it is important to acknowledge that people's experi-
ences related to a particular marker of social difference (e.g. gender)
intersect with other social inequalities and differences (e.g. age, disabil-
ity and/or sexuality) and these interactions shape their ability to avoid
poverty and participate in development processes.
Starting from people's everyday lives in the global South also enables
us to recognize the ways that people exercise 'agency' and actively par-
ticipate in, and contribute to 'development'. This approach, under-
pinned by the influential work of Amartya Sen (1999), Robert Chambers
(1997) and others, helps to shift the discussion away from colonial and
modernization development paradigms that view people as 'victims'
and 'objects' of development towards perspectives that recognize people
as 'social actors' who have dignity and who exercise at least some
degree of agency and 'independence of action' (Rigg, 2007: 10). Women,
men and children in rural and urban environments constantly adapt to
their circumstances, manage vulnerabilities and diversify their liveli-
hood strategies to break the cycle of poverty (Chambers, 1997).
