Paromita Sanyal

The goal of the paper is to understand the “political culture of poverty:” how poverty shapes deliberative discourse, and how deliberation shapes the meaning and lived experience of poverty. This analysis therefore contributes to two important topics with long scholarly histories: the relationship between culture and poverty and deliberative democracy. Read more »

Employing a view of culture as a communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement, which is deeply influenced by social and economic inequalities, the authors argue that the struggle to break free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is political and economic. In this paper, they analyze important examples of discursive spaces - public meetings in Indian village democracies (gram sabhas), where villagers make important decisions about budgetary allocations for village development and the selection of beneficiaries for anti-poverty programs. Read more »