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A little girl, who wants most of all to have a real home and to go to a regular school, hopes that the valley her family has come to, which so resembles the pattern on her treasured blue willow plate, will be their permanent home.

How can poverty be erradicated? How can Africa be industrialised? How can corruption be fought? How armed conflicts be settled? Why are so many Africans maladjusted once back from western universities? How can religious fundamentalism and fanaticism be contained? Do we really fight xenophobia and tribalism? How deeply do we comprehend the principles of the social contract? How do we hold back and eradicate pandemic diseases? How do we contain bad citizenship and insecurity? The sole aim of these stories is to point out some of the daily behaviours Africans should rid ourselves of in the process of building better functioning societies.

Jeremy, who longs to have the black high tops that everyone at school seems to have but his grandmother cannot afford, is excited when he sees them for sale in a thrift shop and decides to buy them even though they're the wrong size.

Poverty and inequality have gained a new public presence in the United Kingdom. Literature, and particularly narrative literature, (re-)configures how people think, feel and behave in relation to poverty. This makes the analysis of poverty-themed fiction an important aspect in the new transdisciplinary field of poverty studies.

Early morning in Uganda see a small boy struggle with jerry cans filled with the day's supply of water. At the village square he spies an aid truck filled with something amazing, what can a such a small barefoot boy do to earn the treasure inside that truck?

Stories that Bind: Political Economy and Culture in New India examines the assertion of authoritarian nationalism and neoliberalism; both backed by the authority of the state and argues that contemporary India should be understood as the intersection of the two. More importantly, the book reveals, through its focus on India and its complex media landscape that this intersection has a narrative form, which author, Madhavi Murty labels spectacular realism. The book shows that the intersection of neoliberalism with authoritarian nationalism is strengthened by the circulation of stories about “emergence,” “renewal,” “development,” and “mobility” of the nation and its people. It studies stories told through film, journalism, and popular non-fiction along with the stories narrated by political and corporate leaders to argue that Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism are conjoined in popular culture and that consent for this political economic project is crucially won in the domain of popular culture. Moving between mediascapes to create an archive of popular culture, Murty advances our understanding of political economy through material that is often seen as inconsequential, namely the popular cultural story. These stories stoke our desires (e.g. for wealth), scaffold our instincts (e.g. for a strong leadership) and shape our values.  

Sarah and Simon do all they can to help their parents, but when their father, an artist, needs red paint to complete his masterpiece and the art store owner refuses him credit, they do not know where to turn.

Before the rise of private homes as we now understand them, the realm of personal, private, and local relations in England was the parish, which was also the sphere of poverty management. Between the 1740s and the 1790s, legislators, political economists, reformers, and novelists transferred the parish system's functions to another institution that promised self-sufficient prosperity: the laborer's cottage. Expanding its scope beyond the parameters of literary history and previous studies of domesticity,Be It Ever So Humbleposits that the modern middle-class home was conceived during the eighteenth century in England, and that its first inhabitants were the poor. Over the course of the eighteenth century, many participants in discussions about poverty management came to believe that private family dwellings could turn England's indigent, unemployed, and discontent into a self-sufficient, productive, and patriotic labor force. Writers and thinkers involved in these debates produced copious descriptions of what a private home was and how it related to the collective national home. In this body of texts, Scott MacKenzie pursues the origins of the modern middle-class home through an extensive set of discourses-including philosophy, law, religion, economics, and aesthetics-all of which brush up against and often spill over into literary representations. Through close readings, the author substantiates his claim that the private home was first invented for the poor and that only later did the middle class appropriate it to themselves. Thus, the late eighteenth century proves to be a watershed moment in home's conceptual life, one that produced a remarkably rich and complex set of cultural ideas and images.

\"Poverty and injustice test one man's relentless optimism. From one of China's foremost authors, Jia Pingwa's Happy Dreams is a powerful depiction of life in industrializing contemporary China, in all its humor and pathos, as seen through the eyes of Happy Liu, a charming and clever rural laborer who leaves his home for the gritty, harsh streets of Xi'an in search of a better life. After a disastrous end to a relationship, Hawa \"Happy\" Liu embarks on a quest to find the recipient of his donated kidney and a life that lives up to his self-given moniker. Traveling from his rural home in Freshwind to the city of Xi'an, Happy brings only an eternally positive attitude, his devoted best friend WuFu, and a pair of high-heeled women's shoes he hopes to fill with the love of his life. In Xi'an, Happy and Wufu find jobs as trash pickers sorting through the city's filth, but Happy refuses to be deterred by inauspicious beginnings. In his eyes, dusty birds become phoenixes, the streets become rivers, and life is what you make of it. When he meets the beautiful Yichun, he imagines she is the one to fill the shoes and his Cinderella-esque dream. But when the harsh city conditions and the crush of societal inequalities take the life of his friend and shake Happy to his soul, he'll need more than just his unrelenting optimism to hold on to the belief that something better is possible\" --Back cover.

Executive Summary This article argues that the long-standing binary between “refugees” and “economic migrants” is doctrinally outdated and normatively indefensible in light of contemporary displacement realities. While the 1951 Refugee Convention recognizes persecution only as targeted political or identity-based harm, millions of people today are compelled to migrate by forms of extreme deprivation produced by discriminatory governance, systemic state neglect, and global economic structures. The article develops the concept of structural persecution to describe situations in which socio-economic harm is attributable to identifiable state actions, omissions, or broader systems of power, and demonstrates how such circumstances can fall within the meaning of persecution under existing Convention grounds. It proposes an interpretive framework that enables refugee law to respond coherently to modern displacement dynamics without altering the Convention definition, while also grounding protection within a broader framework of global justice. Key Findings: The refugee/economic migrant divide is a legal fiction that obscures the political and structural drivers of poverty-induced displacement. Extreme deprivation is often the result of identifiable policies, governance failures, or transnational economic arrangements, not neutral misfortune. Current refugee doctrine privileges individualized, intentional harm, making it poorly equipped to recognize coercion embedded in structural systems, such as state abdication of essential services, discriminatory development policies, or state complicity in environmental degradation. Human rights law already recognizes severe socio-economic deprivation as a violation of core rights, including life, dignity, subsistence, and non-discrimination. The artificial separation between refugee law and human rights law produces an incoherent protection regime. Structural persecution is compatible with the Refugee Convention when understood as persecution arising from systemic deprivation linked to a Convention ground. It can be analyzed through established concepts such as constructive persecution, cumulative harm, and discriminatory impact. Regional frameworks in Africa and Latin America already acknowledge that displacement stems from complex crises involving economic collapse, governance failure, and environmental harm. These instruments offer models for more context-reflective protection in international law. Global inequities and historical patterns of extraction shape contemporary mobility, creating obligations of responsibility-sharing for states whose policies contribute to structural drivers of displacement. Policy Recommendations: Integrate structural persecution into refugee status determination by adopting doctrinal tests that assess serious harm, structural causation, disproportionate impact linked to Convention grounds, and lack of state protection. Issue UNHCR and national-level guidance explicitly recognizing that systemic deprivation, when attributable to identifiable actors or policies, may constitute persecution under the 1951 Convention. Expand complementary protection frameworks to cover individuals fleeing survival-threatening conditions where structural harm does not neatly align with Convention grounds. Develop responsibility-sharing mechanisms, including financial, resettlement, and technical commitments, based on states’ contributions to global economic, environmental, and security structures that generate displacement. Reform global migration governance frameworks, including implementation of the Global Compacts, to better protect individuals in “vulnerable situations” whose displacement arises from structural forces. Strengthen regional protection systems and support Global South innovations, such as those reflected in the Cartagena Declaration and Kampala Convention, to ensure that structural drivers of displacement are recognized as legitimate grounds for protection. Align humanitarian, development, and protection programming with the understanding that displacement is often rooted in systemic inequalities, requiring holistic responses that address both immediate needs and underlying structural conditions.