2014
DOI: 10.5153/sro.3441
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Welfare Commonsense, Poverty Porn and Doxosophy

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 fo… Show more

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Cited by 190 publications
(190 citation statements)
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References 12 publications
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“…Similarly, those with the most positive views towards benefit expenditure and claimant behaviour are on average more knowledgeable about the welfare system than those who are negative about it. This implies that the relentless stream of 'poverty porn' (Jensen, 2014) in the media and the practice of agnotology (Slater, 2012) can produce a misleading picture of the welfare system and may generate harsher attitudes towards benefit claimants and benefits expenditure as a result.…”
Section: Knowledge Of Welfare Benefits Expenditurementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Similarly, those with the most positive views towards benefit expenditure and claimant behaviour are on average more knowledgeable about the welfare system than those who are negative about it. This implies that the relentless stream of 'poverty porn' (Jensen, 2014) in the media and the practice of agnotology (Slater, 2012) can produce a misleading picture of the welfare system and may generate harsher attitudes towards benefit claimants and benefits expenditure as a result.…”
Section: Knowledge Of Welfare Benefits Expenditurementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Crucially, for neoliberal discourse to enter and dominate wider public 'common sense', vehicles of 'populist language' are required (Jensen, 2014). In this context, the genre of so-called 'reality TV' serves significant ideological functions.…”
Section: Neoliberal Ideology Poor-hate and 'Reality Tv'mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…10 A combined 'incentives and consequences' approach (DWP, 2012) included: the introduction of a benefit cap (to ensure 'everyone had the same incentive to work' (DWP, 2012: 39, emphasis added)); the creation of The Work Programme (a welfare-to-work pay-by-results strategy introduced in 2011 and outsourced to a range of (often private sector) organisations); the Work Choice scheme ('helping' unemployed disabled people to adapt to the demands of the workplace); and increased sanctions for claimants who did not 'fulfil their responsibilities' (DWP, 2012: 39, emphasis added). Corroboration for the worklessness myth from self-perpetuating political and media rhetoric has propagated new forms of 'commonsense' about poverty, disability and unemployment (Jensen, 2014).…”
Section: [Cut To Scenes Of Prison Officers Urgently Running Upstairs mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Braye, Dixon, and Gibbons (2013) explored the scepticism and 'cynicism' of the 2012 Paralympics and associated media coverage amongst disability activists. The 'narrow' range of disabled characters in popular television shows has been widely criticised (for example by Wilde, 2014), and the concept of 'poverty porn' (Jensen, 2014) is highly applicable when examining mass media coverage of disabled people. The influence of mass media coverage of disability issues on politics -and vice versa -is unclear, and cannot serve as a proxy for political discourse and decisions.…”
Section: Disability and Discourse Literaturementioning
confidence: 99%