I’m pleased to announce that my first ethnography, Materializing Poverty: How the Poor Transform their Lives (2013, AltaMira) is now available for pre-order. A big thanks to everyone who has helped me along the way!The result of my fieldwork from 2004-2012, the book explores how residents of a Santo Domingo squatter settlement use their material environment to shape their lives and change their futures. I argue that, although poverty is generally defined as a lack of material resources, the relationships that poor people have with their possessions are not just about deprivation. Material things play a positive role in the lives of poor people: they help people to build social relationships, address inequalities, and fulfill emotional needs. I explore how residents use their material resources creatively to solve everyday problems and, over a few decades, radically transform the community. Their struggles show how these everyday engagements with materiality, rather than more dramatic efforts, generate social change and build futures.Author informationErin TaylorPost Doctoral Research Fellow, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, University of Lisbon at Research Fellow, Digital Ethnography Research CentreErin originally studied fine art, but she defected to anthropology when she realised that she was far better at deploying a pen for writing than for drawing. She is a cultural anthropologist who is currently living in Lisbon, Portugal, where she has a full-time research position at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS).TwitterFacebookGoogle+Original article: My book’s available!©2013 Erin B. Taylor. All Rights Reserved.
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