What if we abolished poverty?

What do you understand as homelessness? What do you understand as poverty?

Poverty, as most of us understand it, is the state of being extremely poor. But, for Honors Program Director Vicky Lawson and Geography Department Chair Sarah Elwood, the question is how poverty is created. People are often quick to characterize those experiencing housing instability as at fault, instead of recognizing the racial, social, historic, political and power structures that lead people to be impoverished. In the Seattle area, those factors include unaffordable housing in the city, lack of health and mental health care, gentrification, extreme income inequality and NIMBY — not in my backyard — politics.

Geography professors Lawson and Elwood also illuminate how our understandings of poverty, including the very definition of success — having a job, owning a house, fulfilling the American dream — are the result of complex histories and structures that stabilize white privilege. Our current culture holds individuals entirely responsible for their circumstances, as though history and public policy played no part. Lawson and Elwood show that the people are fine; it’s the systems that need to be changed.

Geography professors and co-conveners of the Relational Poverty Network, Vicky Lawson (left) and Sarah Elwood (right). (Photo taken pre-pandemic.)

Referencing BIPOC intellectual traditions, Lawson and Elwood explain that the term ‘poverty’ overly simplifies explanations and understandings of lived experiences of impoverishment. They and other scholars call for abolishing poverty — replacing the idea of ‘poverty’ with a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the systems that create it.

At its heart, abolition calls on us to imagine “what if?” What if we replaced a broken system with something better? What if institutional and systemic racism no longer existed? How would that impact housing stability, educational equity, access to healthcare and the like?

To broaden the conversation on abolishing poverty, Lawson and Elwood founded the Relational Poverty Network (RPN). The RPN brings together scholars, teachers, activists and policy makers from across disciplines and the world to explore and critique relationships of power and privilege. They examine the ways that policies perpetuate impoverishment. The members run research projects and host podcasts exploring the complexities surrounding houselessness and impoverishment. The Network’s research is published in journals and newspapers to influence policy and advocacy.

The study of poverty is cross-disciplinary and like all Interdisciplinary Honors classes, Lawson’s Abolishing Poverty class brings together majors ranging from STEM to film studies to business. Students also bring the many intersecting identities they hold into the conversation — BIPOC, refugee, immigrant, LGBTQ+, white, straight. They bring with them their lived experiences and understandings ranging from: “that person in the tent is my family member” to “cross the street when you see a houseless person.”

Lawson and Elwood celebrate the opening of the Real Change exhibit, “Portraits for Change” with Jon Williams (center), former art director for Real Change. Williams also created the exhibit. The exhibit came to the UW’s Allen Library in 2020, pre-pandemic.

As part of class, Lawson asks students to examine what they know about houselessness and poverty. She assigns students in the class different topics to facilitate class sessions — ranging from the city’s response to houselessness, to mutual aid organizations, to the history of living outside in Seattle to an abolitionist approach to housing justice.

“Students teaching students is very powerful,” explains Lawson. “They are able to pull in examples that feel relevant to 20-year-olds, helping them place the issues in a context they understand.” This context helped many understand their own families’ experiences, from navigating life in America as an immigrant family to complex reasons that contributed to their family’s experiences with criminal justice or housing instability.

“Students came with an open mind,” shares junior Courtney Hooks. “And, in accordance with the Honors Program, reflection was a big topic, as well as the interdisciplinary nature of this study.”

“The work in this class is in noticing the problem, thinking we know about the problem, and then unlearning it,” says Lawson. “That unlearning comes through a historical and intersectional analysis that looks at race and gender and thinks about the way in which Americans have refused to engage the issue of inequality.”

Unlearning poverty is tough work. It asks us to look inward and examine our own understanding and the biases we hold. It calls on us to look beyond ourselves to discriminatory systems and structures. Lawson guides students through this process, helping them discover that the complexities of the issue expand beyond one field. She teaches that solutions come from collaborations with community members — unhoused and housed — who hold wisdom about needed changes. Hooks remembers her classmates taking steps toward relationship building, sharing reflections on their conversations with unhoused people: “Before, that person was demonized and dehumanized for me. But now I see them as my neighbor, and I feel that something really needs to happen.”