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This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelian oikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retraction compounded by austerity policies and national responses to excessive resource extraction and waste production. Both austerity and formal recycling schemes shift responsibility onto consumer citizens, regardless of capacity. Further, this model of thrift eclipses the thriftiness of low-income urban households, which emerges at the nexus of kin and waged labor, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need for decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicized ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift coexist, change over time, and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centered on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households and undermines their ability to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations.
This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelian oikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retraction compounded by austerity policies and national responses to excessive resource extraction and waste production. Both austerity and formal recycling schemes shift responsibility onto consumer citizens, regardless of capacity. Further, this model of thrift eclipses the thriftiness of low-income urban households, which emerges at the nexus of kin and waged labor, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need for decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicized ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift coexist, change over time, and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centered on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households and undermines their ability to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations.
This chapter has thirteen sections: 1. Early Middle English; 2. Theory; 3. Manuscript and Technical Studies; 4. Religious Prose and Verse; 5. Secular Prose; 6. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience and Cleanness; 7. Piers Plowman; 8. Gower; 9. Older Scots; 10. Drama; 11. Secular Verse; 12. Romance: Metrical, Alliterative, Prose. 13. Hoccleve and Lydgate. Section 1 is by Ayoush Lazikani; section 2 is by Andrew Finn; section 3 is by J.D. Sargan; section 4 is by Natalie Calder; section 5 is by Johannes Wolf; section 6 is by Rafael J. Pascual; section 7 is by Joel Grossman; section 8 is by Laurie Atkinson; section 9 is by Kate Ash-Irisarri; section 10 is by Daisy Black and Sarah Brazil; sections 11 and 12 are by Darragh Greene, with contributions by Johannes Woolf on Malory; 13 is by Rebecca Menmuir.
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