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Welfare Commonsense, Poverty Porn and Doxosophy

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  • Tracey Jensen

Abstract

This article critically examine how Benefits Street - and the broader genre of poverty porn television - functions to embed new forms of ‘commonsense’ about welfare and worklessness. It argues that such television content and commentary crowds out critical perspectives with what Pierre Bourdieu (1999) called ‘doxa’, making the social world appear self-evident and requiring no interpretation, and creating new forms of neoliberal commonsense around welfare and social security. The article consider how consent for this commonsense is animated through poverty porn television and the apparently ‘spontaneous’ (in fact highly editorialized) media debate it generates: particularly via ‘the skiver’, a figure of social disgust who has re-animated ideas of welfare dependency and deception.

Suggested Citation

  • Tracey Jensen, 2014. "Welfare Commonsense, Poverty Porn and Doxosophy," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 19(3), pages 277-283, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:socres:v:19:y:2014:i:3:p:277-283
    DOI: 10.5153/sro.3441
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Aura Lehtonen, 2018. "‘Helping Workless Families’: Cultural Poverty and the Family in Austerity and Anti-welfare Discourse," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 23(1), pages 84-99, March.
    2. Sarah Leaney, 2022. "Common Sense as Political Struggle: Asserting the Right to Home Following the Grenfell Tower Fire," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 27(4), pages 1113-1121, December.
    3. Ruth Patrick & Aaron Reeves & Kitty Stewart, 2021. "A time of need: Exploring the changing poverty risk facing larger families in the UK," CASE Papers /224, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    4. Anna Tarrant & Kahryn Hughes, 2020. "The Ethics of Technology Choice: Photovoice Methodology with Men Living in Low-Income Contexts," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 25(2), pages 289-306, June.
    5. Garthwaite, Kayleigh & Bambra, Clare, 2017. "“How the other half live”: Lay perspectives on health inequalities in an age of austerity," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 187(C), pages 268-275.
    6. Andrew Dunn, 2021. "Attitudes to work and time spent unemployed across 30 years," Economic Affairs, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(2), pages 225-240, June.
    7. Webb, Calum & Bywaters, Paul & Scourfield, Jonathan & Davidson, Gavin & Bunting, Lisa, 2020. "Cuts both ways: Ethnicity, poverty, and the social gradient in child welfare interventions," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 117(C).
    8. Katherine Harrison & Jayne Raisborough & Lisa Taylor, 2021. "From Streetscapes to Sofas: Representations of Place and Space in Britain’s Benefit Blackspots," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 26(2), pages 377-393, June.
    9. Stewart, Kitty & Reeves, Aaron & Patrick, Ruth, 2021. "A time of need: exploring the changing poverty risk facing larger families in the UK," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 121530, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

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