Project description
Exploring 20th century poverty representation
The early 20th century witnessed a surge of interest in depicting the struggles of the poor in British culture. However, did this heightened attention to poverty conceal a persistent allegiance to values of productivism? This commitment to productivity posed social and environmental risks, according to Michel Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme, the CP20 project will use a mixed methods approach, including computational criticism and archival research, to scrutinise representations of poverty in literature and sociology. By analysing a digital corpus and studying texts by authors like Elizabeth Gaskell and Storm Jameson, CP20 will shed light on the subtle ties between poverty portrayal and productivism.
Objective
The early twentieth century saw a major shift towards an interest in representing the experiences of the poor within British culture. This project develops an account of how this trend might be defined in relation to earlier nineteenth-century patterns, developing and scrutinising the hypothesis (founded upon Michel Foucault's analysis of neoliberalism) that heightened levels of attentiveness masked a continued commitment to productivist values, deemed by Kohei Saito, Jason Hickel, and others to be socially and environmentally harmful.
Using a mixed methods approach, combining computational criticism, archival research, and theoretical analysis, this project explores evolutions in early twentieth-century representations of poverty in Britain within the domains of literature and sociology. In the first instance, a digital corpus of representations of poverty is built and analysed to quantitatively analyse this trend. In the second, archival case studies of four authors (Elizabeth Gaskell, Bronislaw Malinowski, Charles Booth, and Storm Jameson) enable a more nuanced appraisal of these findings through close reading of neglected texts. In the third, a theory is developed concerning the relationship between poverty representation and productivism in the early twentieth century, indicating that popular literature and sociology played a key but under-acknowledged role in enabling the advancement of productivist ideology. Through an extensive range of dissemination, exploitation, and communication activities - including workshops, video content, and interaction with campaign groups - an effort is made to ensure that these findings broaden the scope of current inquiries into productivism and its associated harms.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
9019 Tromso
Norway