Subverting Poverty Stigma—Dub Theology and the Politics of Shame

Poverty stigma scapegoats people with direct experience of poverty, blaming and shaming them for being poor. The depiction of poverty as individual moral failure has enabled political leaders to sidestep its systemic causes. In breadline Britain the blaming and shaming of people in poverty as ‘undeserving’ ‘skivers’ has resembled a debilitating form of epistemic violence. Drawing on case studies and interview data from our Life on the Breadline project, this paper breaks new ground by fashioning an austerity-age theology of liberation that provides researchers with the tools to subvert the demeaning damage wrought by poverty stigma. The paper demonstrates the ways in which the power of language enabled policymakers to fashion a powerful political myth that has scapegoated and diminished the agency and the dignity of people in poverty. The use of primary research and the transformative potential of dub hermeneutics enable the paper to demonstrate how a holistic emancipatory engagement with the Biblical concept of shalom and the development of a politics of empathy and spirituality of solidarity can resource a new theology of liberative reversals that subverts poverty stigma.