Poverty: More Than Just a Lack of Material Resources?

Abstract

AbstractKrayter and Ariaans empirically demonstrate how poverty is becoming increasingly connected to medical and psychological language as well as to medicalized and psychologized institutional categories. By first showing that poverty is a social construct whose meaning has developed throughout the decades, the authors reveal that scientific publications have contributed to an increasingly medical and psychological definition of poverty. Drawing on the example of Germany, the authors explain how political actors have medicalized and psychologized the issue of poverty as well as how German institutions have increasingly frequently drawn on medical and psychological labels and categories.