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Poverty in the united states: an analysis of its measurement and the long-term social and economic costs.

Abby Magnus , University of Denver Follow

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Masters Thesis

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College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Economics

First Advisor

Juan Carlos Lopez

Second Advisor

Markus Schneider

Third Advisor

Chiara Piovani

Fourth Advisor

Daniel Brisson

Economic mobility, Health social inequities, Mass incarceration, Poverty, Poverty measurement, Social institutions

This thesis examines the role of poverty in the United States and how it has impacted social and economic systems. It explores how U.S. poverty measurements developed in the 1960s may not be accurately measuring poverty now, and the ways in which these measures could be improved upon. This work also reviews literature on health and educational inequities stemming from socioeconomic class, and the role these play in long-term economic mobility. Finally, it analyzes how larger social institutions like mass incarceration and capitalism have developed around poverty, and the role they play in maintaining its prevalence today. This thesis finds that systemic barriers to economic mobility play a much larger role in the persistence of poverty than the actions and behaviors of individuals experiencing poverty. Without addressing poverty as such on a political level, poverty will continue to exist and persist in our society.

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Abby Magnus

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Magnus, Abby, "Poverty in the United States: An Analysis of its Measurement and the Long-Term Social and Economic Costs" (2020). Electronic Theses and Dissertations . 1797. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/1797

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Poverty Reduction: Concept, Approaches, and Case Studies

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• First Online: 10 January 2020
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• Yakubu Aliyu Bununu 7  

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals ((ENUNSDG))

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Definitions

Poverty is universally measured in monetary expenditure terms, and individuals that are considered poor are those living on less than US$1.25 per day. Poverty is however multifaceted as it includes the multitude of lack and deprivations that poor people are subjected to in their lives on a daily basis. These include but are not limited to disease and poor health conditions, illiteracy and lack of access to education, appalling living conditions, lack of access to economic opportunity and disempowerment, underemployment, vulnerability to violence, and exposure to hazardous environmental conditions (OPHI 2019 ). Thus, poverty reduction can be considered as the improvement of an individual’s or group’s monetary expenditure to an amount above the poverty line while improving access to education, healthcare, information, economic opportunities security of land-tenure, and all the other deprivations associated with it.

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The eradication of poverty is perhaps the only...

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Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria

Yakubu Aliyu Bununu

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Bununu, Y.A. (2020). Poverty Reduction: Concept, Approaches, and Case Studies. In: Leal Filho, W., Azul, A., Brandli, L., Özuyar, P., Wall, T. (eds) Decent Work and Economic Growth. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71058-7_31-1

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Received : 23 August 2019

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Culture of Poverty

Introduction.

• Media Sources
• Foundational Texts
• Empirical Evidence
• Informing Policy
• Early Criticisms
• Urban Ethnography/Neighborhood Studies
• Theoretical Refutations of the Culture of Poverty
• The Underclass
• Critiques of the “Underclass” Framework
• The New Poverty Studies
• Welfare Reform

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Culture of Poverty by Dana-Ain Davis LAST REVIEWED: 11 January 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 11 January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0004

The term culture of poverty emerged in 1959 to explain why people were poor. The culture of poverty concept delineates factors associated with poor people’s behaviors, and argues that their values are distinguishable from members of the middle class. The persistence of poverty can presumably be explained by the reproduction of this “lifeway,” because the values that the poor have are passed down generationally. Initially the term was primarily applicable in Third World countries and in those nation-states in the early stages of industrialization. Culture of poverty proposed that approximately 20% of poor people are trapped in cycles of self-perpetuating behavior that caused poverty. More specifically, 70 behavioral traits or characteristics are identified with those who have a culture of poverty. These characteristics include weak ego structure, a sense of resignation and fatalism, strong present-time orientation, and confusion of sexual identification. Alternately, intellectual support has been found for various aspects of the culture of poverty concept and for criticisms leveled against the explanatory power of the framework. As it pertains to explaining poverty in US-based urban areas, ensuing research has focused on several areas, including the presentation of empirical evidence that identifies and explicates the absence, or presence, of some of the characteristics found among the poor. These include: social participation, pathological family structure, social isolation, and individual behavioral traits, among others. While the term did have its supporters, the degree of support varied. For example, some argued that while a culture of poverty did exist, the definition of culture was not adequate enough to use the framework effectively. The concept also had detractors, and, in fact, it has served to polarize poverty research scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Some scholars find the concept ill-conceived because it is not empirically or politically contextualized. Others have found that the concept, which centers on individual behaviors, overlooks the interaction of behavior and structure. Still others claim that the urban-centric focus that came to be associated with the concept both subsumed the reality of poverty in urban areas and simultaneously racialized poverty as it became associated with African Americans.

A great number of journals address the subject of poverty, but none is specifically focused on the culture of poverty concept. Anthropology is far from the only, or even the primary, discipline to elaborate or critique the framework. Across disciplines, one will find the issue of poverty covered in a number of peer-reviewed/refereed journals, as well as those that are not peer-reviewed. Many of the journals are focused on policy and research, such as the Journal of Children and Poverty , the Journal of Poverty , and Poverty and Public Policy . However, other journals are more interdisciplinary, such as Race, Poverty, and the Environment and the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice . No anthropological journals are dedicated exclusively to the subject of poverty; however, major journals, such as Critique of Anthropology , American Anthropologist , Ethnology , and City and Society have each attended to poverty issues and culture of poverty debates over the years.

American Anthropologist .

This is the premier journal of the American Anthropological Association. The journal advances the association’s mission by publishing articles that add to, synthesize, and interpret anthropological knowledge.

City and Society

This is the journal of the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. The journal is intended to foster debate and conceptual development in urban, transnational anthropology.

Critique of Anthropology .

This is an international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the development of anthropology as a discipline that subjects social reality to critical analysis.

Ethnology .

This a quarterly journal devoted to offering a broad range of general cultural and social anthropology. It publishes only articles.

Journal of Children and Poverty .

This journal serves as a forum for research and policy initiatives in the areas of education, health and public policy, and the socioeconomic causes and effects of poverty.

Journal of Poverty .

This a quarterly journal dedicated to research on poverty that goes beyond narrow definitions of poverty based on thresholds. It takes the view that poverty is more than the lack of financial means; rather, it is a condition of inadequacy, lacking, and scarcity. Published by Haworth Press.

Journal of Poverty and Social Justice .

The Journal of Poverty and Social Justice covers poverty-related topics as they are connected to social justice located in the United Kingdom. Contributors include researchers, policy analysts, practitioners, and scholars. Published by the Policy Press.

Poverty and Public Policy: A Global Journal of Social Security, Income and Aide and Welfare .

This is a new global journal that began publishing in 2009. It publishes policy research on poverty, income distribution, and welfare. It begins with the assumption that progress is possible and policy has a role to play in alleviating global poverty. Published on behalf of the Policy Studies Organization.

Race, Poverty, and the Environment .

This twenty-year-old journal is concerned with social and environmental justice. When it was founded, the goal was to strengthen the connections between environmental groups, working people, poor people, and people of color.

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Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty

Clare Callahan is assistant lecturer at Sacred Heart University, where she teaches courses in poverty and literature and the health humanities. She is currently working on her first book project, “Abandoned Subjects.” Her writing on women and poverty in modernist American literature has been published in Twentieth Century Literature .

Joseph Entin is professor of English and American studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is coeditor of three books and the author of Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (2007) and Living Labor: Fiction, Film, and Precarious Work , which is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press in its Class: Culture series.

Irvin Hunt is associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (2022). His writing on class and social movements in the Black radical tradition has been published in American Literary History, Public Books, American Quarterly , and in the collection African American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 (2022).

Kinohi Nishikawa is associate professor of English and African American studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (2018). His writing on class and gender politics in African American print culture has been published in American Literary History , the Edinburgh History of Reading , and in the collection Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (2020).

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Clare Callahan , Joseph Entin , Irvin Hunt , Kinohi Nishikawa; Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty. American Literature 1 September 2022; 94 (3): 383–397. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10084470

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Public rhetoric tends to present poverty as a static condition, often a condition of abject and total deprivation, rather than recognize it as an ongoing act of dispossession. Yet the word poverty itself has the potential to open up quite different connotations. Based on a somewhat uncommon etymology, poverty derives from the Old French poeste , which means power, and poeste gives form to in poustie , which means possibility. 1 As possibility, poverty is a dilemma for governance and, likewise, for the way poverty studies often treats the poor: as “a discrete and singular category,” as apprehensible and governable (Goldstein 2018 : 83). This special issue is a call to reflect on interpretive approaches: to consider how the very attempt to govern people betrays the way poverty poses a problem not only for governance but also, by exuberant extension, for representation itself. We say exuberant , productively overflowing, to mark how literature gives us the elasticity to think poverty beyond the disciplinary walls that segregate thought around it and beyond the representational need to make the poor, and even impoverishment, apprehensible. We have put together this special issue because we believe literature can renovate the word poverty in ways that illuminate conditions it has been wielded to hide, as well as the new coalitions and forms of relationality poverty makes possible. Across two centuries, literature has unsettled the term poverty , and we need this disruption now more than ever. The essays in this special issue show that literature uniquely exceeds the terms of poverty’s representation. It alights our attention on our manner of attending, beyond attempts to reduce, resolve, or otherwise impoverish our understanding of these terms.

• The Pervasiveness of Poverty

In December 2017, Australian professor Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, arrived in Los Angeles for a two-week tour of the United States to investigate the contours of economic suffering in the world’s wealthiest nation. Accompanied by a reporter and photographer from the London-based newspaper The Guardian (but not, notably, a representative from the New York Times ), Alston traveled from California to Alabama; Washington, DC; West Virginia; and Puerto Rico. 2 He found, The Guardian reported, “a land of extreme inequality,” and his conclusions were blunt: poverty in the United States is pervasive; “contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound” (Pilkington 2017 ). Drawing on statistics provided by the US Census Bureau, Alston reported that, as of 2016, 41 million Americans, almost 13 percent of the population, lived in poverty. Forty percent of those lived in “deep” poverty, with incomes less than 50 percent of the official poverty threshold. In addition, he noted, the United States had the highest infant mortality rate in the so-called developed world; 18 percent of American children lived in poverty, comprising over 30 percent of the nation’s poor (Alston 2017a ).

Alston presented economic hardship and deprivation in the United States as a striking paradox: expansive poverty amid America’s affluence and its foundational dedication to equality and opportunity. In the report on his findings, Alston ( 2017b ) noted that, during his tour, “American exceptionalism was a constant theme in my conversations. But instead of realizing its founders’ admirable commitments, today’s United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights.” This notion, that American poverty is a paradox of plenty, is a venerable, common framing. Noted poverty scholar Mark Robert Rank ( 2011 : 16) likewise describes poverty as “a fundamental paradox: in America, the wealthiest country on earth, one also finds the highest rates of poverty in the developed world.” Challenging the deeply embedded notion that poverty is a product of individual faults or pathologies—a refusal to work hard, a lack of adequate skills, a psychology of dependency—Rank contends that “American poverty is largely the result of failings at the economic and political levels.” While contesting the idea that poverty constitutes an individual rather than an institutional problem is laudable, the assertion that poverty is a structural “failing” nevertheless suggests that economic deprivation is a contradiction rather than a constitutive element, a bug and not a design feature. Such framing obscures the possibility that poverty is endemic to US capitalist society—a predictable, integral, even necessary, outcome of the way America’s profoundly racialized economy is structured.

Despite the undeniable statistical evidence for economic privation and suffering in the United States, poverty continues to be “poorly understood” and too-little discussed, especially in the humanities and certainly in literary studies (Rank, Eppard, and Bullock 2021 ). Poverty presents not only a policy problem but also a conceptual problem of seeing and representation; if and how poverty can be addressed as a collective social and political concern depends on how it is depicted and understood. Historian Alice O’Connor ( 2001 ) contends that the institutionalized study of poverty, which she calls “poverty knowledge,” has privileged the expertise of professional researchers and academics while largely excluding poor people themselves as sources of insight. In the twentieth century, poverty emerged as an object of intense public interest and debate in key moments: the Progressive era, when muckrakers and reformers set out to uncover and remedy the contradictions roiling an emerging industrial modernity; the 1930s, when writers, artists, and documentarians, many employed by the US government, surveyed economic hardship across the country and forged support for New Deal policies; and the 1960s, when the federal government launched a “war” on poverty. But the public’s attention to poverty has waned over the past fifty years, under neoliberalism. In the 1980s and 1990s, the war on poverty became a de facto war on the poor, as liberals and conservatives alike breathed new life into long-standing ideas about the “unworthy” poor to focus policy on individual pathology and dependency, infamously personified in President Ronald Reagan’s spurious image of the “welfare queen.” Mobilizing the “culture of poverty” thesis to blame the poor—especially poor people of color—for the poverty they faced, this line of thinking was weaponized to justify the 1996 passage, under President Bill Clinton, of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which aimed to “end welfare as we know it.” In the ensuing neoliberal era, US social policy, under the guise of promoting “hard work” and “healthy marriages,” has functioned effectively to punish, humiliate, and control the poor, especially those who are Black, Latinx, and Indigenous. 3

Propped up by corporate and academic interests, the neoliberal consensus on economic inequality has shown significant cracks since the turn of the century. Over the last decade in particular, economic inequality and extreme wealth have emerged as prominent topics of American political and public discourse, from Occupy Wall Street and its framing of the 1 percent versus the 99 percent; to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, which openly criticized corporate greed and the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires; to the swelling membership of the Democratic Socialists of America. All of these developments raised spiking economic disparity to national prominence. Yet such attention to the growing inequality of our society seems to go hand in hand with relative silence on poverty, whether from voices of the poor or voices for the poor. 4 We may be living in a second Gilded Age, but it seems that our capacity for critique has not kept up with the intensified, and ubiquitous, realities of economic hardship in the United States. The fact that images of dependency, poor choices, and individual and communal pathology continue to represent the most readily available ways to understand poverty suggests that our contemporary political and media cultures are suffering a poverty of the imagination.

The same might be said of our literary culture. In a 2009   Inside Higher Ed op-ed, Keith Gandal predicted that the economic crisis would lead to literary studies finally putting “poverty near the top of the agenda and the center of the field.” More than a decade later, poverty remains stubbornly marginal to literary studies. While poverty constitutes an enduring topic of research in the social sciences, with numerous efforts to correct for the biases embedded in the shockingly durable “culture of poverty” thesis devised originally by Columbia University–trained anthropologist Oscar Lewis in the late 1950s, 5 literary studies and the humanities more broadly have had little to say about it. To be sure, there is a growing, and important, focus in criticism and theory on wealth inequality, precarity, dispossession, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and other forms of domination and subordination. Yet poverty is not reducible to the dynamics named by these keywords, even as it is connected to them. There is a lacuna in humanistic inquiry around not so much the conditions that create poverty as the very recognition of impoverishment as such.

This special issue of American Literature addresses that blind spot by asking what literary culture distinctively has to offer an understanding of poverty in the United States. What theories and methods of reading does literature about poverty demand? What language for talking about poverty does literature provide? In turn, what kinds of demands and pressures do efforts to address poverty, dispossession, and extreme economic inequality place on literary form and language? If the social sciences have claimed this area of inquiry for decades, what can literary studies do to help complicate and challenge dominant forms of poverty knowledge? Might literature offer a poverty knowledge of its own?

In addressing these questions, we build on critical work that has attended to the vexing dilemmas of literary and cultural representation raised by poverty as a category of analysis. Gavin Jones’s American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (2007) suggests that poverty has generated “a sophisticated literary strain” (Jones 2007 : xv) that has not been adequately examined because the focus in literary studies “on oppressed subject positions has tended to evade the problems of economic inequality by centering social marginalization on the cultural identity of the marginalized” (7). Gandal, author of The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum ( 1997 ) and Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film ( 2007 ), and Walter Benn Michaels, author of The Trouble with Diversity ( 2007 ), agree with Jones that the problem of economic privation in US literature has been subsumed by the language of identity. Elsewhere, Michael Denning ( 2007 ; 2010 ) argues for reassessing the categories of labor and class to account for global poverty, precarity, and unemployment. This special issue contributes to these reassessments. Yet rather than juxtapose identity and economics, marginalization and class, subjectivity and structural power, we aim to explore the literary interplay of these categories.

As an economic and social condition, poverty is often perceived as a static state of lack, exclusion, and invisibility rather than, more actively, as a process, a relation, and a matter of “predatory inclusion” or “organized abandonment” (Taylor 2019 ; Gilmore 2015 ). As a form of structured economic deprivation, poverty is always contextual, defined by and against specific social and national norms and expectations; the poor are always conceived against the well-to-do, although individuals often move across those economic categories over time. (In fact, Rank [2011: 18] and his colleagues have found that most Americans will spend at least one year below the poverty line during the course of their lives.) Where to draw the “poverty line” is a subject of debate and struggle. In this special issue, we are concerned with poverty not only as a material condition but also as an object and source of knowledge and art; poverty presents an epistemological and representational problem as well as an economic and social one. To be sure, a great deal of American writing has tended to reinforce the abject incapacity of the poor and the seemingly intractable boundary between the poor and well off. By contrast, this special issue turns primarily to the work of writers who expose the damaging incapacity of those very literary frameworks, suggesting both the failures of top-down efforts to render the poor legible and the possibilities that literature can render poverty otherwise, beyond the conventional liberal categories and conceptualizing lenses that have come to dominate representations of poverty in the United States.

• Reading Poverty Otherwise

Several critics have turned to literature as a wellspring for thinking through such alternatives. Asking, after Jones’s American Hungers , why scholarship in the United States has so far failed to produce “a theoretical discourse that describes the contemporary experience of poverty,” Gayle Salamon ( 2010 : 176) calls for a theory that would enable thinking about the lives of the poor in terms of “their conditions of possibility otherwise,” suggesting that literary scholars are in a position to produce such a theory. The relentless present that seems to organize the experience of poverty and beyond which Salamon calls on literary theory to think is, we suggest, not only a temporal but also an ontological problem, one that has often encouraged the bare life conception of poverty that this special issue seeks to contest. 6

In an effort to understand poverty in terms of power and potentiality, Patrick Greaney takes up this ontological problem by turning to literature. “The thematic representation of the poor,” Greaney ( 2007 : xv–xvi) writes, “as an actual individual or group characterized by socioeconomic misery alternates with the non-representative moments in which literary language . . . reduces itself to the potential for representation.” Greaney turns to literary language, then, precisely because it does not seek to capture and negate the agential aspects of poverty that seem otherwise to evade representation. “Literary language,” he continues, “acknowledges in moments when it becomes poor that poverty creates not an identity but a capacity, even if it appears,” through the lens of deprivation, “as an incapacity.” In other words, for Greaney, literature, in its juxtaposition of theme and form, understands the ontological contingency of poverty as both less and more than the possessive individualism of the neoliberal subject. This special issue calls for literary scholars to take up the work of navigating this persistent conflict between the ongoing ontological dispossession that denies the poor the right to exist—even as they perform productive social and material labor that is critical to society and the economy—and the ongoing emotional, psychological, and physical labor by impoverished people of ontological repossession in the form of covert capacities and potentiality. By ontological repossession , we mean the ways in which poor people are continually reclaiming their status as social and human subjects despite sociopolitical systems that would deny them such status.

Greaney’s reading calls to mind the writer Dorothy Allison’s ( 1992 ) observation, in the context of her coming out as a lesbian when she was a young girl in a poor and working-class churchgoing community, that being an “endangerment to society . . . gives you a lot of power.” Along these lines, this special issue suggests that the literature of poverty does not merely represent poverty but in effect offers a theory of reading poverty otherwise—a theory that might help us to recognize the forms of social, epistemological, and even material power the poor possess despite their active dispossession. The United States has an especially rich tradition of literature by and about the poor, from its inception and extending into our contemporary moment. 7 Contemporary texts that surpass the paradigm of representation as a mode of objectification, pathologization, or surveillance, or of imagining a futurity for the poor only by way of uplift, include fiction by Allison, Gloria Naylor, Jesmyn Ward, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Junot Díaz, and Tommy Orange, as well as poetry by Rafael Campo and C. D. Wright, to name only a few. Analyses of these authors’ writing has focused primarily on issues of race and gender and only secondarily on poverty. This trend has had the perhaps inadvertent effect of treating poverty as a socioeconomic condition or circumstance in which more organic forms of identity are grounded. In such readings, poverty becomes background rather than an active subject, process, or relation.

Together with the contributors to this special issue, we want to ask how an academic conversation around such a set of texts might be transformed if the question of poverty became a primary critical framework through which they were read. One challenge this possibility poses is that, while writers and scholars have sought to recuperate minoritized racial and gender identities through affirmative and celebratory narratives, a similarly recuperative approach to understanding poverty seems to run a greater risk of romanticizing material deprivation; at the same time, lamenting these material realities of poverty risks framing the poor as abject. 8 Extending poverty studies to include literary studies, or vice versa, offers the opportunity to reflect on how the literary as a unique mode of representation can elucidate the ways in which scarcity is manufactured in order to disinherit targeted populations, while also valuing the alternative epistemologies, forms of sociality, and aesthetic and cultural practices that communities produce in response to disinheritance.

Literature and literary studies can, moreover, shape an understanding of poverty by theorizing a mode of address that can resist forms of representation that have historically enabled, for example, criminalization of the means of survival among the poor; at the same time, literature can navigate the critical representational structures through which the poor demand resources necessary for more durable, less provisional modes of living. That the literary as a form of representation grapples with its own conditions of possibility situates it as having a privileged relationship to modes of being, like poverty, that have historically and methodologically posed a problem of representation. Consider, for instance, the scene from Jacob A. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) in which the early flash technology of Riis’s camera causes him to set fire to one of the tenement buildings he’s touring and attempting to document. How the Other Half Lives depicts a city riven between genteel society and the tenements. Riis’s ( 1997 : 38) voyeuristic tour through the tenements’ “dark bedrooms” frequently followed the police, who at times burst into apartments and rooming houses at night to expose the dangers lurking within. In the cited scene, Riis acknowledges that “once, in taking a flash-light picture of a group of blind beggars . . . I managed to set fire to the house” (30). Riis’s incendiary mode of expression here betrays the violence that underlies certain forms of representation: in attempting to bring to light—to expose and enclose—the dark spaces of the tenements, he nearly burns one down. Only the thickness of dirt on the walls, a violation of standards of hygiene, keeps it from burning (30). What Riis ultimately illuminates, then, is the capacity of impoverished spaces themselves to interfere in their negation. In this way, literary language, as a reflexive form that mediates what escapes or resists representation, speaks to the mechanics of this interference. This scene acts as a reminder that poverty , in its etymological relation to aporia , suggests both a without and also a kind of exuberance, what we have evoked here as the “sociality” and “potentiality” and what might also be called the threatening alterity or “collective living otherwise” of the poor (Goldstein 2021 : 117). If certain literary, photographic, and journalistic texts and traditions have variously sought to enclose the poor through exposure, then the work of literary criticism in poverty studies today is twofold: to identify contemporary rhetorical practices of such enclosure and to elaborate narrative countermovements and alternative vocabularies.

• Beats per Minute

In many respects, centering poverty in literary studies is work that remains to be done. We consider this introduction, as well as the essays assembled here, a collective step toward that work. In taking that step, we believe a broad range of criticism may begin to find common ground where it is otherwise siloed into disciplinary knowledge formations. Literary poverty studies might bring together scholarship on financialization and debt; settler colonialism and dispossession; racial capitalism and the carceral state; foreclosure and homelessness; class and proletarianism; and the psychic lives of precarity. It also has the potential to bridge period studies on the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the War on Poverty era, and our present moment. But in order to do these things, critics must be willing to name, address, and engage poverty in literary and cultural representation, even and especially when it refuses to identify itself as such. For why should it not be the case that, given the trajectory of poverty discourse over the past century, literature would struggle to represent an alternately pathologized and obscured life experience? As critics delve into the literary and historical archives of forgotten or buried experience, perhaps we ought to train our senses on a population whose very existence challenges the norms by which we assign value to social and political identities.

As we worked on this project, we considered how we might convene a special issue in which much of the editorial work involves bringing that field into critical discourse. Our method of curating the articles and review essays that appear here identifies poverty as a critical keyword in literary studies. This process of identification is open-ended, carried out with contributors as they presented and revised their work. The articles represent original research across two centuries of American literary history, drawing on sundry subfields. Likewise, the review essays reflect on recent monographs that address questions of poverty and dispossession in literature and criticism even if not all are explicitly about those topics. In bringing these pieces together, neither we nor the authors proceeded from a predetermined set of disciplinary or even interdisciplinary moves. The task was to think together about what it means to center poverty in literary studies at all. A welcome result of that work is five articles that do much to expand the critical imagination. In their own ways, they approach poverty not only as a socioeconomic condition but also as a mode of experience that exceeds racialized and capitalist taxonomies.

Jean Franzino’s “Tales Told by Empty Sleeves: Disability, Mendicancy, and Civil War Life Writing” begins the issue. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials, from street-corner ephemera to federal pension files, Franzino analyzes the textual forms and reception contexts of printed media sold by disabled Civil War veterans for their economic support. These so-called mendicant texts, whose first-person literary accounts lent support to face-to-face financial transactions, highlight traits of authenticity, individuality, and agency in a process Franzino theorizes as a scene of “prosthetic narrative.” Not coincidentally, such traits lie at the heart of how scholars value life writing as both validating and informing the critical orientation of disability studies and poverty studies alike. Yet the powerful connection between material impoverishment and literary creation in mendicant texts means that these traits cannot be taken at face value: some disabled people had to invent the truth they knew people wanted to hear. Thus mendicant texts are, in Franzino’s terms, canny performances of need to a public that risks becoming indifferent to disabled veterans’ plight. In a remarkable critical turn, she contends that approaching mendicant texts precisely for their fictionality and serial or generic authorship allows us to apprehend the actual deprivation from which these people suffered. Moving beyond the need to find “proof” of intersectional oppression, Franzino suggests that mendicant performativity outlines the social dynamics that produce disabled, impoverished subjects in the first instance.

In her article, “Picturing Poverty in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Lori Merish similarly enlists the archive; here, she uses the photographic archive of the same era in order to trace a correspondence between the emerging conception of poverty as a social problem, rather than as an inevitable condition, and the emergence of the modern conception of childhood as a state of dependency. Tracing this correspondence in philanthropic photographic images of poor children, Merish shows that the modern appreciation for childhood innocence surfaced simultaneously and dovetails with the perceived innocence, which is to say, the representational authority, of the photographic medium. In this way, philanthropic photography of poor children in the mid-nineteenth century seeks to void what we have already described here as the threatening alterity of the poor. Merish, considering the work of pioneering urban reformer Samuel B. Halliday and his collaborator, the photographer Richard A. Lewis, before she turns to an examination of “the literary afterlife” of Halliday’s images in Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), argues that mid-nineteenth-century visual and literary imagery of poverty configured the poor as morally legible by picturing their deprivation; in this sense, she advances Franzino’s reading, with regard to Civil War writing, of the fraught deprivation narratives of mendicant texts. “Picturing Poverty” thus also contributes to this special issue’s taking issue with historical and ongoing efforts to render the poor and poverty itself apprehensible through narratives of incapacity and privation. Merish builds on our critique not only in showing how philanthropic photographs of poor children act as a form of capture but also by further arguing that this body of photography and the literature it haunts, as seen in Alger, signifies a willingness on the part of the subject to be captured, to be made visible, a willingness that renders its subject worthy of philanthropic resources.

In “‘Ain’t Any Chance to Rise in the Paper Business’: Poverty, Race, and Horatio Alger’s Newsboy Novels,” Emily Gowen picks up where Merish left off, with a resonant study of what, she argues, is literature’s historical dependence on—rather than transcendence of—a mass print culture supported by the economic exploitation of another group of urban minors: newsboys. Like Merish, Gowen contends that Alger valorizes the impoverished adolescent who surrenders to surveillance, a willing capitulation that Alger associates with Anglo-Saxon whiteness. But in her readings of Ragged Dick and Rough and Ready (1869), Gowen takes a different tack, seeing in these novels a challenge to the nineteenth-century notion that cultural literacy could be a source of upward mobility for the newsboy. She thus interrogates and departs from the dominant reading of Alger as an apologist for philanthropic paternalism. Alger’s imagining of “a workable path up and out of poverty” through self-making, Gowen claims, actually functions to expose the impossibility of any class or individual transcending social and economic forces. In this way, Gowen’s reading of Alger’s novels treats literature as a reflexive mode capable of autocriticism in its laying bare the bankruptcy of the liberal notions of progress and the self on which literary value has historically been predicated. In this treatment of literature, Gowen does the work for which this special issue calls, that of identifying rhetorical practices of enclosure within a set of texts and recognizing narrative countermovements within the same set of texts.

Such reflexivity is expertly on display in Cody C. St. Clair’s “The Scene of Eviction: Reification and Resistance in Depression-Era Narratives of Dispossession.” St. Clair locates the problems of housing and homelessness at the center of modernism during the 1930s. Against the backdrop of newspaper reports on proliferating evictions (such reportage was a genre growing popular by the day with its pathologization of the poor), St. Clair compares eviction scenes in H. T. Tsiang’s The Hanging on Union Square (1935) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), with passing but perceptive treatment of works by Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, and others. This comparison produces both a material and aesthetic intersectionality: according to St. Clair, Tsiang uses a “flat” Cubist aesthetic, Ellison a “thick” collagist one, and together these horizontal and vertical approaches reflect the entanglements of racial and class mechanisms. St. Clair ultimately shows how these authors exploit the internal contradictions of dispossession. Forms of reification, St. Clair argues, are both marks of structural violence and means for being otherwise, for practicing alternative and potentiating ways of relating to housing and of building coalitions.

Continuing this vein of transfiguration, Crystal S. Rudds explores the manner in which literary representations bring to light individual and collective capacities that are typically rendered invisible by dominant discourses of urban poverty as a form of pathological failure. Rudds’s essay, “On Perspective and Value: Black Urbanism, Black Interiors, and Public Housing Fiction,” examines literary representations of one of the most recognizable, highly charged, and racialized spaces of poverty in US society—public housing, which prevailing depictions tend to render as a realm of abject Blackness, crime, and human incapacity that is effectively beyond repair or redemption. To exceed these reifying frames, Rudds contends, is a matter of both literary history and literary critical method; it requires knowing not only where to look—in this case, Frank London Brown’s novel Trumbull Park (1959) and Jasmon Drain’s short story collection Stateway’s Garden (2020), both part of a larger tradition of public housing fiction—but also how to read, in this instance, phenomenologically, through the grounded, subjective perspectives of public housing residents themselves, rather than through an exterior perspective that sees “the ghetto” as a symbol of material and cultural impoverishment. Reading public housing fiction phenomenologically, Rudds contends, makes visible what Elizabeth Alexander calls “the Black interior,” interior spaces of relation and sociality that lie beyond, and implicitly refuse and refute, the often condescending or castigating disciplinary gaze of the social and behavioral sciences. Thus, writing the social life of physical spaces—apartments, hallways, kitchens, and bedrooms—produces “a countercultural value system that speaks back to outsider rhetorical claims.” Public housing fiction offers an encounter with and an understanding of poverty, but it does so through the place- and value-making practices, relations, and struggles of residents rather than the pity, contempt, or fear of external commentators.

Together, these essays stage what is at stake in how literature understands poverty, elucidating not only the problem of poverty but also, and especially, the problem of how we see it. To see poverty differently, they might conclude, is not only a matter of what we see. It is a matter of reflecting on how we see. This work of reflection brings us to the art that graces this issue’s cover: Kevin Lane’s “Beats per Minute.” Lane’s painting mimics a mirror. It is an abstraction sensitively grounded in the material conditions of poverty, which have everything to do with the conditions of perspective. His inkblot technique, a paper fold (hold) that becomes a kaleidoscope, brings looking into crisis: color under duress should not be able to do that. The sheer visual force of it, its exuberance, its use of brown that fades with surprise into purple, pink, yellow, and green, all figured as a heart—to enter these pages this way is to disrupt all of poverty’s knee-jerk associations: darkness, deprivation, and so on. It is to look at vibrant forms of life and living hidden behind structures of confinement. We see wings that are more than wings, hence a heart that is more than a heart, more than what a body bears behind a cage. With Lane, as with everyone else in this volume, we mean not only to look again. We mean to look differently.

Oxford English Dictionary , “Poverty,” https://www-oed-com.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/149126?redirectedFrom=poverty#eid (accessed April 14, 2022).

A search of the New York Times reveals no coverage of Alston’s American sojourn, although the paper did cover Alston’s ensuing trip to the United Kingdom.

See Wacquant 2009 and Goldstein 2021 .

A notable exception here is the contemporary Poor People’s Campaign, which aims “to build a broad, fusion movement that could unite poor and impacted communities across the country.” https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/about/ .

See Lewis 1959 , 1966 .

Salamon ( 2010 : 175) argues that poverty works to force the poor “relentlessly into the present.”

John Marsh ( 2011 : 606) notes that “American literature itself could be said to begin with the problem of poverty and inequality,” while “countless American writers . . . have at one point or another turned their thinking or their art toward the question of poverty.”

John Allen ( 2004 : 11) similarly notes that criticism on themes of homelessness has largely taken up literary romanticism or realism, categories, he argues, that should be questioned.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Poverty Reduction, Empowerment, Participation'

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Yologlu, Ali Cenap. "A Critical Evaluation Of Enabling Strategies Toward Poverty Reduction: The Case Of Conditional Cash Transfer Program In Turkey." Master's thesis, METU, 2004. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/2/12605477/index.pdf.

Bayor, Isaac. "Community Participation in Poverty Reduction Interventions: Examiningthe Factors that impact on the Community-Based Organisation (CBO) Empowerment Project in Ghana." Thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2010. http://etd.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=etd&action=viewtitle&id=gen8Srv25Nme4_2150_1298618279.

Hence, in this mini-thesis I argue that community participation does not automatically facilitate gains for the poor. My main assumption is that internal rigidities in communities, such as weak social capital, culture, trust and reciprocity, affect mutual cooperation towards collective community gains. I used two communities, where a community empowerment project is implemented, as a case study to demonstrate that the success of community participation is contingent on the stocks of social capital in the community. The results show that the responsiveness of the two communities to the project activities differs with the stocks of social capital. I found that trust among community members facilitates information flow in the community. The level of trust is also related to the sources of information of community members about development activities in the community. I also found that solidarity is an important dimension of social capital, which determines community members&rsquo willingness to help one another and to participate in activities towards collective community gain. The research also demonstrated that perception of community members about target beneficiaries of projects&ndash whether they represent the interest of the majority of the community or only the interest of community leaders &ndash influences the level of confidence and ownership of the project. From my research findings, I concluded that, in order for community participation to work successfully, development managers need to identify the stocks of social capital in the community that will form the basis to determine the level of engagement with community members in the participatory process.

Weinstein, Flore Saint Louis. "Women's Empowerment as a Policy for Poverty Reduction in Haiti." ScholarWorks, 2019. https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations/7092.

Lawrence, Yolisa Innocentia. "Poverty alleviation through empowerment and participation: the Seki Women's Foundation." Thesis, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10948/d1020020.

Khuluq, Lathiful. "Democracy, participation, and empowerment: poverty alleviation programs in Sleman, Yogyakarta, Indonesia." Thesis, McGill University, 2009. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=32533.

Gudjonsson, Sigurdur <1976&gt. "The Road to Poverty Reduction: Corporate Governance and Female Participation in MFIs." Doctoral thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2015. http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/6838/.

Tanghöj, Erike. "Poverty Reduction through the participation of the poor!? : A study of the Poverty Reduction Strategies in Uganda and Bolivia from a civil-society perspective." Thesis, Jönköping University, JIBS, Political Science, 2007. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-684.

The situation of the low developed countries has been on the agenda of IMF and the World Bank throughout the years. However, after the disastrous failure of the Structural Adjustment Programs, the two financial institutions left the ideas of 'one model fits all' and economic growth equals development. Rather, tailored development programs and poverty reduction became the new foci. Further, it is today stressed that the broad-based participation of the civil-society and the ownership of the nation over the development process are the most important factors for successful and sustainable development. These ideas conforms the basis of the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) initiative which was adopted by IMF and the World Bank in 1999.

This paper will investigate indications and perceptions, given by the civil-society, of the concepts of its participation and ownership within the Poverty Reduction Processes in Bolivia and Uganda. The objective is also to, in an inductive manner, develop and increase the understanding of how, and through what means, the two concepts have been realised and contextualised. In order to fulfil this purpose, the contents and origins of the PRS initiative are outlined and the definitions of participation and national ownership, in accordance to IMF and the World Bank, are stated. Secondly, against the derived theoretical framework an empirical pilot study will be conducted, based on literature studies. The primary conclusion drawn from the analysis is that it is impossible to broaden the understanding of what types of participation that have been applied. However, important and interesting insights have been reached in relation to how participation has been contextualised. First and foremost, for a genuine participation of the civil-society it is not enough with physical presence at official consultation meetings. The people must be enabled to actively and directly participate in, and influence the agenda of, all the stages of the PRS process. In regard to national ownership it has been concluded that the term bestow more than the balance between national, governmental and international influence - it is also a feeling of being able to participate in, and influence the outcome of, PRS process. Overall, the major finding is that for a real apprehension of national ownership and participation the perception of the civil-society must be accounted for. It is the people who decide whether they have been adequately involved and if they see themselves to be the owners of the process!

Diedhiou, Mamadou Alpha. "Good governance and participation in poverty reduction strategy papers in sub-Saharan Africa : a policy genealogy." Thesis, University of the West of England, Bristol, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.432303.

Mustafa, Zahid, and Nodirbek Ismailov. "Entrepreneurship and Microfinance-A tool for empowerment of poor-Case of Akhuwat, Pakistan." Thesis, Mälardalen University, School of Sustainable Development of Society and Technology, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-852.

Purpose: Our main purpose is to carry out a research on combining microfinance with entrepreneurship for poverty alleviation, empowerment of poor and sustainable development.

Target group: Students, researchers in Microfinance field, MFI’s, NGO’s and Governmental structures.

Research Question: How do micro entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship and microfinance serve as a combined tool to reduce poverty, empower people, and contribute to sustainable development in Pakistan?

Approach: We used qualitative approach for research. The data have been collected through interviews which held as structured and unstructured, and as secondary sources web page of the organization, statistics of Pakistan and Book of organization have also been consulted.

Delimitations: Due to distance problem between Pakistan and Sweden and, it was difficult to organize interviews at large scale from borrowers and this can reflect limited information about micro entrepreneurship. It is worthy to say here that Islamic microfinance is quite new practice and very limited data was available. With this, we mainly emphasized on microfinance and entrepreneurship as a combined tool, therefore, there is not enough discussion on Islamic microfinance. But we try to elaborate a complete picture of Islamic microfinance. Originality/value: This paper emphasizes on both Microfinance and Entrepreneurship, as case study we choose Akhuwat organization which started to give loans to poor people without interest. Also we focused on Social Entrepreneurship side of organization which challenges to other MFI’s with innovative type of loaning. Research will give a vision to Akhuwat and other micro financing organization that how they can develop activities more successfully.

Future implications: During our research we investigate that there is need to carry out more research on lending methods other than solidarity group. The other area is micro entrepreneurship that needs to be more investigated by researcher because in developing countries micro business with only traditional ways will not be so successful. There will be need of more innovation in production system or in business processes. Islamic microfinance is quite new way for lending loan. It is needed that researcher of western world also do research on this method. So that clear result should come and method becomes more mature.

Social Entrepreneurship also need to be discovered from many points, especially relation with profit and non for profit, public, private and nongovernmental models.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Microfinance, Social Entrepreneurship

Paper type: Master Thesis

Kamruzzaman, Palash. "Participation in theory and practice in the production of a poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSP) : the case of Bangladesh." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.494163.

Garr, Ewald Quaye. "Infrastructure policy reforms and rural poverty reduction in Ghana : the case of the Keta Sea Defence Project." Thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2010. http://etd.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=etd&action=viewtitle&id=gen8Srv25Nme4_3240_1299063830.

This minithesis seeks to understand why infrastructure projects fail to contribute effectively to poverty (rural) reduction. The thesis assumes that though infrastructure provision can impact positively on rural poverty reduction, the same infrastructure provision has worsened or put people in worse conditions of poverty. Therefore it is not automatic that infrastructure provision would reduce rural poverty as often held. The thesis goes on to postulate that a positive relationship between infrastructure and rural poverty reduction is best achieved within a broad or generic policy which provides the framework for providing such infrastructure. The thesis assesses these assertions empirically by first, testing the relationships between infrastructure and rural poverty reduction. Here a large scale infrastructure project in Ghana known as the Keta sea defence project serves as the case study. Secondly the thesis assesses Ghana&rsquo s infrastructure provision policy environment and its implications on rural poverty reduction in the affected communities of the Keta sea defence project.

Musingafi, Maxwell. "Single mothers empowerment through small business development projects in Gweru, Zimbabwe : the case of the GWAPA Poverty Alleviation Programme / Maxwell Constantine Chando Musingafi." Thesis, North-West University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10394/2861.

Yeldell, Shauna Dilworth. "Impact of Microfinance Institutions for Female Entrepreneurs: Evidence from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2019. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/563112.

Bruiners, Natasja. "Multi-purpose community centres : a local economic development strategy towards sustainable community empowerment and poverty alleviation in the Dwars River region." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/53509.

Eduah, Gregory. "The Impact of the World Bank’s SAP and PRSP on Ghana: Neoliberal and Civil Society Participation Perspectives." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31487.

Redman, David F. "Tourism as a poverty alleviation strategy: opportunities and barriers for creating backward economic linkages in Lang Co, Vietnam : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Development Studies at Massey University, New Zealand." Massey University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/1059.

Kinuthia, Wanyee. "“Accumulation by Dispossession” by the Global Extractive Industry: The Case of Canada." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/30170.

Bambeni, Ntobeko. "Challenges faced by the state- funded rural women’s co-operatives in reducing poverty in the Mbhashe area, Eastern Cape Province." Diss., 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/36810.

Worton, Jane. "Poor people's participation in poverty reduction." Thesis, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/1400.

Krüger, Abraham Andries Johannes. "The textile industry as a vehicle for poverty reduction : a community empowerment model." 2015. http://encore.tut.ac.za/iii/cpro/DigitalItemViewPage.external?sp=1001490.

Icheku, Jude Emeka. "The church and poverty reduction : the case of the Hope Empowerment Scheme of Durban Christian Centre Church." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/2081.

Muruvi, Wanzirai. "Assessing Community Conditions that Facilitate Implementation of Participatory Poverty Reduction Strategies." Thesis, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10214/3167.

Kodj, Grace Dede. "The role of women in poverty reduction in Ghana." Diss., 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/27560.

Callistus, Agbaam Akachabwon. "Assessing the impact of the livelihood empowerment against poverty (leap) social grant programme on household poverty reduction in rural Ghana: a case study of the Tolon-Kumbungu district in northern Ghana." 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/3940.

Runguma, Sebastian Njagi. "The political economy of poverty reduction in Kenya : a comparative analysis of two rural countries." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10539/15407.

Abiche, Tefera Talore. "Community empowerment and sustainable livelihoods : transforming social capital into entrepreneurship in rural Southern Ethiopia." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/10190.

Chauya, Ivy Violet. "The effectiveness of community development groups in poverty reduction with regards to individual community members : the case of Likasi area development programme in Mchinji district, Malawi." Diss., 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/18928.

Menyuko, Elsie Deliwe. "The experiences of participants in income-generating projects in Atteridgeville, Tshwane." Diss., 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/4802.

Chibwe, Edward M. "Using robust identification strategies to evaluate impact of 2010/2011 farmer input support programme on maize yields and asset accumulation in rural Zambia." Diss., 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/43301.

Koagetse, Motlapele Sylvia. "The impact of a development centre approach on poverty alleviation in Region A of the City of Johannesburg." Diss., 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/23641.

Mashego, Thabo Rodney. "Evaluation of the level of community participation in the implementation of the Indigent Exit Strategy as a poverty alleviation measure in the City of Tshwane." Diss., 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/19611.

Eschbach, Philipp. "The effect of entitlement and patronage on empowerment : a case study on a development project in Bangladesh." Diss., 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/25544.

Anjos, Ana Paula Dionísio dos. "Os orçamentos participativos na capacitação territorial de Bragança e o papel do serviço social." Master's thesis, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10316/94877.

Oberholzer, Petra Malan. "Bemagtiging van kliënte in die maatskaplike werk binne die konteks van armoede." 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/15685.

Ali, Adem Chanie. "Participatory development communication in Ethiopia : a local development organization in focus." Thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/22071.

Kapundu, Anny Kalingwishi. "A critical evaluation of the roles and strategies of civil society organisations in development : a case study of Planact in Johannesburg." Diss., 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/23561.

Bhomoyi, Ntombikayise Mandisa. "Human security and development : a case of Diepsloot, extention 12, Johannesburg." Diss., 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/27551.

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Professor Emeritus David Lanning, nuclear engineer and key contributor to the MIT Reactor, dies at 96

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David Lanning, MIT professor emeritus of nuclear science and engineering and a key contributor to the MIT Reactor project, passed away on April 26 at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts, at the age of 96.

Born in Baker, Oregon, on March 30, 1928, Lanning graduated in 1951 from the University of Oregon with a BS in physics. While taking night classes in nuclear engineering, in lieu of an available degree program at the time, he started his career path working for General Electric in Richland, Washington. There he conducted critical-mass studies for handling and designing safe plutonium-bearing systems in separation plants at the Hanford Atomic Products Operation, making him a pioneer in nuclear fuel cycle management.

Lanning was then involved in the design, construction, and startup of the Physical Constants Testing Reactor (PCTR). As one of the few people qualified to operate the experimental reactor, he trained others to safely assess and handle its highly radioactive components.

Lanning supervised experiments at the PCTR to find the critical conditions of various lattices in a safe manner and conduct reactivity measurements to determine relative flux distributions. This primed him to be an indispensable asset to the MIT Reactor (MITR), which was being constructed on the opposite side of the country.

An early authority in nuclear engineering comes to MIT

Lanning came to MIT in 1957 to join what was being called the “MIT Reactor Project” after being recruited by the MITR’s designer and first director, Theos “Tommy” J. Thompson, to serve as one of the MITR’s first operating supervisors. With only a handful of people on the operations team at the time, Lanning also completed the emergency plan and startup procedures for the MITR, which achieved criticality on July 21, 1958.

In addition to becoming a faculty member in the Department of Nuclear Engineering in 1962, Lanning’s roles at the MITR went from reactor operations superintendent in the 1950s and early 1960s, to assistant director in 1962, and then acting director in 1963, when Thompson went on sabbatical.

In his faculty position, Lanning took responsibility for supervising lab subjects and research projects at the MITR, including the Heavy Water Lattice Project. This project supported the thesis work of more than 30 students doing experimental studies of sub-critical uranium fuel rods — including Lanning’s own thesis. He received his PhD in nuclear engineering from MIT in fall 1963.

Lanning decided to leave MIT in July 1965 and return to Hanford as the manager of their Reactor Neutronics Section. Despite not having plans to return to work for MIT, Lanning agreed when Thompson requested that he renew his MITR operator’s license shortly after leaving.

“Because of his thorough familiarity with our facility, it is anticipated that Dr. Lanning may be asked to return to MIT for temporary tours of duty at our reactor. It is always possible that there may be changes in the key personnel presently operating the MIT Reactor and the possible availability of Dr. Lanning to fill in, even temporarily, could be a very important factor in maintaining a high level of competence at the reactor during its continued operation,” Theos J. Thompson wrote in a letter to the Atomic Energy Commission on Sept. 21, 1965

One modification, many changes

This was an invaluable decision to continue the MITR’s success as a nuclear research facility. In 1969 Thompson accepted a two-year term appointment as a U.S. atomic energy commissioner and requested Lanning to return to MIT to take his place during his temporary absence. Thompson initiated feasibility studies for a new MITR core design and believed Lanning was the most capable person to continue the task of seeing the MITR redesign to fruition.

Lanning returned to MIT in July 1969 with a faculty appointment to take over the subjects Thompson was teaching, in addition to being co-director of the MITR with Lincoln Clark Jr. during the redesign. Tragically, Thompson was killed in a plane accident in November 1970, just one week after Lanning and his team submitted the application for the redesign’s construction permit.

Thompson’s death meant his responsibilities were now Lanning’s on a permanent basis. Lanning continued to completion the redesign of the MITR, known today as the MITR-II. The redesign increased the neutron flux level by a factor of three without changing its operating power — expanding the reactor’s research capabilities and refreshing its status as a premier research facility.

Construction and startup tests for the MITR-II were completed in 1975 and the MITR-II went critical on Aug. 14, 1975. Management of the MITR-II was transferred the following year from the Nuclear Engineering Department to its own interdepartmental research center, the Nuclear Reactor Laboratory , where Lanning continued to use the MITR-II for research.

Beyond the redesign

In 1970, Lanning combined two reactor design courses he inherited and introduced a new course in which he had students apply their knowledge and critique the design and economic considerations of a reactor presented by a student in a prior term. He taught these courses through the late 1990s, in addition to leading new courses with other faculty for industry professionals on reactor safety.

Co-author of over 70 papers , many on the forefront of nuclear engineering, Lanning’s research included studies to improve the efficiency, cycle management, and design of nuclear fuel, as well as making reactors safer and more economical to operate.

Lanning was part of an ongoing research project team that introduced and demonstrated digital control and automation in nuclear reactor control mechanisms before any of the sort were found in reactors in the United States. Their research improved the regulatory barriers preventing commercial plants from replacing aging analog reactor control components with digital ones. The project also demonstrated that reactor operations would be more reliable, safe, and economical by introducing automation in certain reactor control systems. This led to the MITR being one of the first reactors in the United States licensed to operate using digital technology to control reactor power.

Lanning became professor emeritus in May 1989 and retired in 1994, but continued his passion for teaching through the late 1990s as a thesis advisor and reader. His legacy lives on in the still-operational MITR-II, with his former students following in his footsteps by working on fuel studies for the next version of the MITR core. 

Lanning is predeceased by his wife of 60 years, Gloria Lanning, and is survived by his two children, a brother, and his many grandchildren .

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