Poverty In the Global South: Liberating psychological inquiry through cultural psychology

Poverty is identified as a condition of disadvantage and instantly raises images of homelessness, hunger, and distress. This multidimensional phenomenon, characterised by the scarcity of resources to fulfill basic needs, affects individuals, families, and communities worldwide. To understand poverty, a range of factors need to be considered, like social, structural, ideological, and historical diversity. Assumptions about the antecedents of poverty guide policy and programmes in poverty alleviation, thereby necessitating a constant update of the science of social disadvantage to ensure accurate understanding and appropriate action. One of the prominent assumptions on which global poverty alleviation endeavours are based relates to psychological factors and the intergenerational transfer of poverty. Taking a cultural psychological approach, this chapter will focus on carefully examining poverty in the Global South, with prominent examples from India and Brazil, to demonstrate how such attributions can potentially create a further disadvantage by blaming the poor for poverty. There is a need to keep principles of ethics and social justice in focus in studying social disadvantage so that our scholarship does not lead to further disadvantaged people living in poverty.