RCN: Relational Poverty Network

该项目将建立一个研究合作网络，其成员将提出概念和方法创新，以推动贫穷研究和解决办法。 关系贫困网络（RPN）将补充和扩展贫困研究与贫困的关系概念化，理论上的贫困产生和解决的经济，政治和社会群体之间的文化关系。 贫困研究人员长期以来一直注意到关系贫困方法作为创新和可行的新分析工具的基础的潜力，但RPN研究人员已经确定了实现这一潜力的重大概念和方法挑战。 由于关系型贫困研究一般都是由孤立的、单一的案例研究组成的，因此，“扩大”关系型贫困分析以进行更大规模的、跨学科的和国际性的比较，会带来一系列基本的概念和衡量挑战。 对贫困的关系方法引入了新的研究对象，如社会关系或对贫困的文化态度，这些都难以在现有的贫困数据中确定或在国家背景下进行比较。 此外，在缺乏密切协调的研究设计和方法的情况下，很难对案例研究进行有意义的比较。 区域方案网络将通过以下方式应对这些挑战：（1）制定概念，以可在国际经验基础研究中进行比较的方式将关系贫困付诸实施;（2）建立描述性元数据，包括定量和定性来源，以支持对研究案例的比较分析以及对个别项目研究结果的综合;（3）为稳健的混合方法研究和“多点对多点”的比较开发共同的研究设计;（4）促进主流和关系贫困研究学者之间的辩论和发现。 RPN的核心小组由30个机构的60名社会科学家组成，他们是跨学科的，包括在美国工作的人类地理学家、社会学家、历史学家、经济学家、人类学家和哲学家。阿根廷、南非、印度、加拿大和泰国。 区域方案网络的概念和方法创新将通过在美国举行的四次年度讲习班来实现。贫困研究中心。 这些讲习班将包括区域方案网络的参与者以及讲习班举办地的研究人员和从业人员。 RPN成员将制定合作赠款提案，以开展其科学活动。 他们将共同撰写研究论文，他们将开发可供使用的教育材料，用于在多学科背景下教授关系贫困方法。RPN将产生各种知识和广泛的影响。 比较关系贫困的概念，描述性的元数据，并在共同的研究设计开发的网络将扩大贫困研究中的关系方法的影响。 该网络将设法吸引广泛多样的主流和关系贫穷问题研究人员加入社会科学基础设施。 网络成员将建立一系列其他途径，以扩大RPN的范围和知识影响，包括公共奖学金，包括公开讲座，流行媒体的文章和在线讨论论坛。 他们还将参与一系列教育活动，如创新的课堂活动，服务学习和研究生网络研讨会。 大多数网络成员将是在公立大学工作的教师学者，他们将通过定期授课招收各种学生直接参与网络。 区域方案网络将通过自己的网站、出版物和会议，并与美国的七个扶贫中心和国际社会科学理事会（ISSC）在教科文组织的一个方案-贫困问题比较研究方案（CROP）协调，广泛传播研究和教育资源。

This project will develop a research collaboration network whose members will generate conceptual and methodological innovations to advance poverty research and solutions. The Relational Poverty Network (RPN) will complement and extend poverty research with a relational conceptualization of poverty, which theorizes poverty as produced and addressed by economic, political, and cultural relationships among social groups. Poverty researchers long have noted the potential of relational poverty approaches as a basis for innovative and viable new analytic tools, yet RPN researchers have identified significant conceptual and methodological challenges to realizing this potential. Because relational poverty research generally has been comprised of isolated, singular case studies, "scaling up" relational poverty analysis for larger, cross-disciplinary, and international comparisons introduces a series of fundamental conceptual and measurement challenges. Relational approaches to poverty introduce new objects of study, such as social relations or cultural attitudes toward poverty that are difficult to identify within existing poverty data or to compare across national contexts. Furthermore; building meaningful comparison across case studies has been difficult in the absence of closely coordinated research designs and methods. The RPN will address these challenges by: (1) developing concepts that operationalize relational poverty in ways that can be compared across international empirically grounded research; (2) building descriptive metadata, including quantitative and qualitative sources, to support comparative analysis across research cases as well as synthesis of research findings from individual projects; (3) developing a common research design for robust mixed-methods research and "many sites-to-many sites" comparisons; and (4) catalyzing debate and discovery across mainstream and relational poverty research scholars. The core group of 60 social scientists at 30 institutions from which the RPN will grow is cross-disciplinary, including human geographers, sociologists, historians, economists, anthropologists, and philosophers working in the U.S., Argentina, South Africa, India, Canada, and Thailand. The RPN's conceptual and methodological innovations will be realized through four annual workshops conducted at U.S.-based poverty research centers. These workshops will involve RPN participants as well as researchers and practitioners from the sites where the workshops are held. RPN members will develop collaborative grant proposals to carry out their scientific activities. They will co-author research papers, and they will develop publically available educational materials for teaching about relational poverty approaches in multiple disciplinary contexts.The RPN will have a variety of intellectual and broad impacts. The comparative relational poverty concepts, descriptive metadata, and in-common research design developed by the network will expand the impact of relational approaches within poverty research. The network will seek to attract a broad and diverse range of mainstream and relational poverty researchers into a social science infrastructure. Network members will build a range of other pathways to broaden the scope and intellectual impact of the RPN, including public scholarship, including public talks, articles in popular media, and online discussion forums. They also will engage in a range of education activities, such as innovative classroom activities, service-learning pedagogies, and graduate webinars. The majority of network members will be teacher-scholars working at public universities who will recruit a diverse range of students through regularly taught classes for direct involvement in the network. The RPN will disseminate research and educational resources broadly, both through its own website, publications, and meetings as well as in coordination with seven U.S. poverty centers and the Comparative Research on Poverty Program (CROP), a program of the International Social Science Council (ISSC) at UNESCO.