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My Voice, My Story Is Powerful Enough
Creating INCLUSIVE Spaces by Changing Narratives
Crossing the Divide
Our society is stratified along the lines of social, political, and economic power. This is a simple truth always worth restating. Those with more power—the minority—are much more likely to occupy positions in society where they can make far-reaching social, political, and economic decisions about the rest, the majority. Accordingly, those with less power, and therefore less capacity to ride boons and evade problems, are largely absent from these decision-making spaces.
There is a practical as well as a philosophical argument for changing the current paradigm to one where more people are able to make decisions about their lives. The practical argument can be summed up by the observation that knowledge is socially situated. What people know and how they perceive the world around them are largely influenced by their material circumstances—by their race, gender, class, and other determinants of life. To identify the best answers for our societal opportunities and ills, it makes practical sense to include those who are closest to the problem.
The philosophical argument questions the right of people to exercise power over others and therefore limit their autonomy. What justifies the power of a select few to determine the material conditions of everyone else’s lives? Are they more deserving? More virtuous? The argument here is that in the spirit of true democracy and self-determination, we should build and maintain the structures of society collectively.
Consider health-related decisions about how we might want to transform our welfare system or how healthcare could be made more accessible to the tens of millions who are uninsured. These matters are decided in both public and private venues by people such as public health administrators, policymakers, and philanthropists. Transforming society in an equitable way then requires opening up these venues and sharing decision-making not only with all other members of society but especially with those who are most directly affected by the inequities of our health systems.
Those who are invested in remedying structural inequities must create inclusive environments where people with lived experience of those inequities can meaningfully participate in decision-making. That is the mission of JoAnne and Ophelia, cofounders of a consulting agency. (We have altered the names of our partners to protect their identities.)
In recent years, several awardees of DASH had the opportunity to work with JoAnne and Ophelia’s consultancy to ensure that the voices of people with lived experience were appropriately represented in their data-sharing partnerships. Once their work with DASH had concluded, we sat down with JoAnne and Ophelia to talk about the inclusion of people with lived experience in policymaking.
Inclusive Spaces, Dominant Narratives
About half a decade ago, JoAnne and Ophelia met at a conference focusing on social issues. The two advocates felt an immediate kinship and soon decided to join forces, establishing their consultancy shortly afterward.
To protect the privacy of our partners, we redacted all personally identifiable information.
Listen to JoAnne and Ophelia retell how they met and how they were often the only person with lived experience in the room.
Today, JoAnne and Ophelia work to incorporate the knowledge, perspectives, and expertise of people with lived experiences of poverty and related issues into the design of the policies and programs that impact their lives. This is how Ophelia describes the concept of lived experience in this context:
The experiences of community members who know the realities of hunger, poverty, and other societal issues by living them daily; [who know] how those experiences impact health and wellness; [who know] the challenges of navigating public benefits programs for support and services; and whose perspectives uniquely qualify them as informed stakeholders who can help shape more equitable policies.
Listen to Ophelia explain how they define ‘lived experience’.
JoAnne and Ophelia’s advocacy and consulting work is a direct result of their personal lived experiences. They both experienced first-hand the effects of poverty, hunger, and housing instability, which is why they are dedicated to the hope that no other person will have to endure the hardships and trauma of poverty.
Engaging in changing policies when you are not a person in power is challenging work. JoAnne and Ophelia find they are often the only people in the room with first-hand knowledge of the issues others are discussing and deciding on. Beyond that, decision-makers often dismiss the stories and solutions JoAnne and Ophelia are willing to share as they strive to nudge policymakers to improve policies.
Why do those with the power to address trying circumstances dismiss people like JoAnne and Ophelia, who have lived or are living through those very circumstances? Why have people with lived experience been “intentionally suppressed,” as JoAnne put it in our conversation, “either by not being invited to the room where the conversations are happening or by only being invited as a token”?
We explored those questions in our conversations with JoAnne and Ophelia. Afterward, we set our conversation in the context of the works of scholars who had studied these issues. We found that a lot of the resistance comes down to enduring gatekeeping narratives. You cannot be trusted, You are not an expert, and I cannot hear you are three dominant cultural narratives that surfaced in our exploration, all used to justify the exclusion of people with lived experience from decision-making spaces.
Narratives matter a great deal. As human beings, we make sense of the world around us by testing the events of our lives against the narratives that exist in our minds. “We all continually channel the stream of events that wash over us into familiar narratives, making sense of what would otherwise appear random,” writes anthropologist Kate Crehan. (i)
The largely subconscious narratives we use to explain the world to ourselves are diverse, messy, and often irrational. Yet, they appear to us as self-evident truths that require no evidence or proof. What matters isn’t whether they are factually true, but that they feel true.
For our purposes, it’s equally important to recognize that society’s most prominent narratives tend to reflect the vantage point of the most powerful who have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. It is for this reason that ‘dominant’ narratives depict the world as a fixed and unchangeable reality, as if urging everyone not to rock the boat.
In the following sections, however, we will try to rock the boat. We will investigate these dominant narratives and explore the implicit logic and arguments that underlie them. Ultimately, we will attempt to demonstrate how these narratives can and should be challenged to ensure that we can create more inviting and inclusive spaces.
In the sections below, we investigate the three dominant narratives often used to justify the exclusion of people with lived experience from decision-making spaces. Once we’ve closely examined every one of these narratives, we will go on to challenge them.
You Cannot Be Trusted
More so than in most other nations, people in the United States believe that, rather than being victims of circumstance, we are primarily masters of our own fate. (ii) Pull yourself up by your bootstraps is the rallying cry of the nation.
“This is an exhilarating vision of human agency, and it goes hand in hand with a morally comforting conclusion,” writes political philosopher Michael J Sandel. “If those who land on top, and those who land on the bottom, are wholly responsible for their fate, then social positions reflect what people deserve.” (iii) The rich are rich, and the poor are poor, thanks to their own doing.
In its practical application, however, this worldview makes some allowances. It accepts that hard times can befall a person who might then require assistance. Sandel explains that the myth of individual agency “conditions public assistance (for welfare, say, or health care) on whether a needy person is needy due to bad luck or bad choices.” [emphasis added] (iv)
The job of governments then is to evaluate who among the poor “might have averted their poverty by making better choices” (‘bad choice’), while people applying for benefits “must present themselves—and conceive of themselves—as victims of forces beyond their control” (‘bad luck’). (v) As the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson wrote a quarter century ago, our prevailing approach to public assistance “offers no aid to those it labels irresponsible, and humiliating aid to those it labels innately inferior.” (vi)
In our conversations, JoAnne and Ophelia talked about how it felt to be the subject of these sentiments. Recounting her experiences of having to apply for food stamp benefits, Ophelia told us,
it is very traumatizing to have to basically write down that I had nothing, and then do an over-the-phone interview to re-explain that I had nothing, and then to get a letter from someone that I knew who once gave me something to prove that I had nothing, [only] to still wait to get nothing.
JoAnne later remarked on “how dehumanizing and demoralizing it often is to access these benefits for which we are eligible.”
Listen to Ophelia and JoAnne describe the challenges of accessing benefits
Despite proving their eligibility, people who access their benefits often face even more suspicion: what if the recipients aren’t helpless after all (‘bad luck’) but are, in fact, irresponsible and corrupt (‘bad choice’)? “I’m fearful every time that I share my story that I may read a comment that says ‘welfare queen,’” Ophelia told us.
Listen to JoAnne talk about SNAP benefits and how political actors treated people experiencing poverty as political pawns
In the bad luck versus bad choice paradigm, American culture favors the bad choice explanation. The logical conclusion then is that we shouldn’t trust what people of low socioeconomic standing have to say, and they therefore should not be in decision-making spaces. “We, people with lived experience, weren’t considered stakeholders, or ‘informed’ stakeholders, or ‘key’ stakeholders,” said JoAnne. Always inscribed on the flip side of the ‘masters-of-our-fate’ coin is the narrative that You cannot be trusted because you make bad choices.
You Are Not an Expert
Thirty-eight million people in the United States are not able to afford basic necessities such as food and shelter. (vii) This constitutes a highly complex social problem, and it seems reasonable on its face to conclude that addressing complex problems requires specialized knowledge.
Our culture tends to favor the skills and experience granted by formal education over those earned by experience, so it’s understandable why we would expect college-credentialed experts to tackle such a problem. Understanding this dynamic is one reason Ophelia has learned to “translate” her knowledge to a type of knowledge decision-makers feel they can trust.
I would speak to folks, and I would say, ‘I have an associate’s [degree] in communications, but I have my PhD in poverty. […] It was intentional with the ‘P-H-D’. Because I am stepping into these rooms with these folks [for whom] that title, that means something. But I put in just as much time, if not more. I’ve been living through this experience and gaining this expertise since I was a child. So, who’s more credentialed in that sector than myself?
Listen to Ophelia speak about the relationship between credentialed expertise and lived experience
But why is that? Why do we favor skills attained at university? Couldn’t expertise derived from life or on-the-job work experiences be just as valuable? The status attached to college credentials Ophelia is referring to has a lot to do with how our society has come to think of higher education in general: not just a place where you can learn skills and expertise, but as a place where you begin to climb the social ladder.
Our dominant national narrative says that college education should be the arbiter of economic opportunity. Many people uncritically accept that a college education should be the key to upward social mobility in the face of the nation’s growing wealth- and income inequality. Get a degree to get ahead is a familiar narrative. In his speech at the White House College Opportunity Summit in 2014, then-President Obama recited these sentiments:
Now, as a nation, we don’t promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea [that] everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That’s an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up. And so I’m glad that everybody wants to go to college. (viii)
The story fits well with the nation’s moral investment in personal agency. If people are masters of their fate, and people get what they deserve, then the project is not to change the structures of our unequal economy and provide for everyone; it is to make sure that everyone can rise and fall within it. Education is merely the vehicle for rising in a modern, knowledge-based society.
This way of thinking conditions us to think about education not primarily as a way to develop expertise but as a requirement for attaining wealth, social esteem, and therefore political power. We can think of education in this respect as the most recent update to the narrative of American individualism. Pull yourself up by your college degree. If people become poor because they make bad choices, then not going to college is seen as their greatest blunder.
Sandel explains that wealthy elites “consider poverty and class status to be, at least in part, due to factors beyond one’s control. By contrast, they consider low educational achievement to represent a failure of individual effort, and therefore the fault of those who do not make it to college.” (ix)
The more explicit dominant narrative that You are not an expert, often used to exclude people with lived experience from decision-making spaces, would suggest that the main issue has to do with knowledge and skill. But what we find is that the underlying, implicit sentiment takes us right back to the earlier bad choice argument. It’s not so much that people with lived experience without a diploma cannot be experts. It’s more that their lack of a diploma is seen as an indication that they cannot be trusted and, therefore, they do not deserve to contribute to the common good, so the prejudicial thinking goes.
I Cannot Hear You
Entering political spaces can be difficult for community members even when they are speaking to an audience of willing allies. This is because a language gap exists between community and policy-makers—a gap within the English language itself.
“Even when people are fully literate in English, we often find that we’re speaking two different languages,” JoAnne told us. “Whenever you gather community, they are going to tell you the policy solutions. Sometimes that’s communicated without translating it back into this policy language.”
JoAnne’s observation highlights how policymaking today is not so much an arena for debating subjective ideas but a quest for finding the best solution to problems defined in objective and quantitative terms. An individual’s personal experiences carry little weight in the face of officially commissioned reports that have large population sample sizes, conclusions filtered through statistical analyses, and solutions framed in the cost-benefit logic of markets.
“This way of thinking about politics is technocratic in the sense that it … treats ideologically contestable questions as if they were matters of economic efficiency,” Sandel points out. (x) Or as Ophelia put it succinctly, “data is their language.”
People who have lived through or are living through poverty and related issues, on the other hand, speak a very different language, one that’s embedded in first-hand, personal experiences, very often in trauma. “Our power is our trauma,” says JoAnne. “That’s a very hard concept to wrap your mind around, when what qualifies you to step into a room with people who hold PhDs is that you are JoAnne B., comma, formerly homeless mother.”
That language is full of feelings, values, and moral judgments. It is inherently subjective and invites political debate about opinions. Very often, the response from decision-makers accustomed to a technocratic approach to politics is that I cannot hear you. Here is how JoAnne put it:
I was so often the anecdote in the room, and people had no problem telling me that. I would bring something up [as] we’d be discussing policy, and I would say, ‘Hey, listen, this is how it’s going to play out. Let’s pause for a minute and really think about this.’ But I was just dismissed as the anecdote. But then years later, I would hear of a study that would document [that] what I was saying was true. But I was dismissed by others—until someone else thought it was important to look at [the issue]. And then it had to come from somebody else who was more researched and more credentialed than I was.
Anthropologist Kate Crehan notes this tendency, too. She reminds us why and how easily the narratives of those with lived experience are often ignored. Since these narratives “fail to conform, either in their language or their content, to the prevailing hegemonic norms,” she writes “they tend to appear—particularly to a society’s dominant groups—incoherent and unintelligible.” (xi)
Listen to JoAnne explain why it’s critical to listen to the solutions proposed by members of the community
In the above sections, we examined how You cannot be trusted, You are not an expert, and I cannot hear you are dominant narratives that often serve to justify the exclusion of people with lived experience from decision-making spaces. In the sections that follow, we will explore how these narratives do not fit the facts on the ground and what that means for decision-makers.
You Can Be Trusted
Are people wholly responsible for their lot in life? Are we masters of our fate? When you interrogate the narrative, it begins to unravel. As enticing as it is to conceive of ourselves as masters of our fate, we are, more so than anything, products of a social system that must produce have-nots to maintain haves.
“Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct,” writes Pulitzer-Prize-winning sociologist Matthew Desmond. (xii) In his thorough-going analysis, he concludes that “the poor are exploited laborers, exploited consumers, and exploited borrowers, precisely because we [the well-off in society] are not,” (xiii) adding that “[t]here is so much poverty in this land not in spite of our wealth but because of it.” (xiv)
Ophelia has observed exactly this. “Where you start is with the acknowledgment of why people struggle. This is deliberate and by design. It is not the cause or responsibility of an individual.” “Let’s call a spade a spade,” she later added while highlighting the importance of naming the systems that produce widespread poverty.
Listen to Ophelia talk about how poverty and its related issues are structural
Decades, if not centuries, of social analysis bears out these facts: poverty is not a bug in the system but a foundational feature of market societies. Poverty exists because it is profitable. The anthropologist and global inequality expert Jason Hickel explains that “our economic system is not designed to meet human needs; it is designed to facilitate capital accumulation. And in order to do so, it imposes brutal scarcity on the majority of people.” (xv)
Understanding that poverty is a structural feature challenges our national narratives of rugged individualism. The dominant narrative that You cannot be trusted simply misidentifies the source of the problem. So, rather than attributing poverty to the irresponsible behavior of individuals, we need to shift our attention to the systems that actively produce and maintain their poverty. Borrowing from the civil rights scholar john a. powell, “we can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people.” (xvi)
Listen to Ophelia explain how her educational experiences led her to understand the importance of policy
In our organizationally complex society, the structures that produce and maintain poverty are encoded in policy. Think about how the federal minimum wage has not been increased in 15 years or how private equity firms can hoard housing assets and hike up prices in the absence of regulations. This means that policy is the lever we must pull to see meaningful change.
“There are policies that impact my life, and there are people behind those policies,” JoAnne told us. “At the end of the day, what we want to see is the policy change that helps to ensure that my sister over here, my brother over here, my child and now my grandchildren, will not go through the same experiences that I went through as a young mother.”
JoAnne then reminded us that “[w]hat we find when we don’t trust community [is that] we spend a lot of time, energy, and money looking for a solution that, if we were to go back, community gave us some time ago.” “Whenever you gather community, they are going to tell you the policy solutions,” she added.
Listen to JoAnne talk about why it’s important to trust community
You Don’t Need to Be an Expert
In our You are not an expert section, we discussed how sentiments of distrust underlie the expertise narrative. In a world where people’s poverty is seen as the ‘deserved’ result of their bad choices, not going to college is considered to be their greatest error in judgment.
The real concern then isn’t whether the smartest but whether the most ‘deserving’ people are in the room. If trust and not expertise is what matters, then our explanation above applies here as well: poverty is a systemic feature of our society, so it is a moot point to ask who among the poor is deserving or trustworthy.
We could leave it at that. But what if we take the expertise argument at face value? Should you need a college degree (“the whole alphabet soup” next to your name, as Ophelia put it) to participate in decisions about solving social problems? Should you need special technical skills and training to have a say in housing or anti-hunger policies? Those are legitimate questions. Sandel makes a compelling argument, however, that the answer is No:
Governing well requires practical wisdom and civic virtue—an ability to deliberate about the common good and to pursue it effectively. But neither of these capacities is developed very well in most universities today, even those with the highest reputations. And recent historical experience suggests little correlation between the capacity for political judgment, which involves moral character as well as insight, and the ability to score well on standardized tests and win admission to elite universities. (xvii)
In this conception, the validity of You are not an expert as a rationale for excluding people with lived experience from decision-making spaces melts away. Take, for instance, Roosevelt’s New Deal, one of the most impactful economic programs in US history. It was designed by an eclectic team of influential advisors, many of whom had no college credentials. Political analyst Thomas Frank describes the varied make-up of Roosevelt’s team in the following way:
Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest confidant, was a social worker from Iowa. Robert Jackson, the U.S. Attorney General whom Roosevelt appointed to the Supreme Court, was a lawyer who had no law degree. Jesse Jones, who ran Roosevelt’s bailout program, was a businessman from Texas with no qualms about putting the nation’s most prominent financial institutions into receivership. Marriner Eccles, the visionary whom Roosevelt appointed to run the Federal Reserve, was a small-town banker from Utah with no advanced degrees. (xviii)
In contrast, today’s policymakers are disproportionately credentialed. 94% of Congress members had a bachelor’s degree in 2021, compared to just 56% in 1945-46. (xix) Meanwhile, only about a third of American adults have a college degree today. (xx) “Turning Congress and parliaments into the exclusive preserve of the credentialed classes has not made government more effective, but it has made it less representative,” argues Sandel. (xxi) Legal scholar Daniel Markovits takes it one step further. “Systematic studies reveal that law and policy respond sensitively to elite preferences while remaining almost totally unresponsive to the preferences of everyone else,” he says. (xxii)
Our task then is to acknowledge that most questions, be it about taxes or your health data, have large components that require lively civic debate, meaning these questions do not require every stakeholder to have a bachelor’s degree, let alone a PhD. You don’t need to be an expert. Our complex social problems merely require people to be civic-minded, democratic participants, willing to bring not just facts, but opinions and personal experiences to the debate.
Listen to JoAnne explain how community members sharing their stories can make an impact on policies
Your Voice Matters
Are your experiences unhelpful or invalid because they are not contextualized within an official report or research project? Does your opinion not matter because it is not presented as part of a larger data sample? Far from it.
It’s critical to remember what so much of data is about. Data in policy-making settings is largely about housing, health, income, and other determinants of people’s lives. But by virtue of its function, data reduces the vast complexity of people’s lives and collapses it onto entries in a spreadsheet or line items in a state budget. People’s emotions, beliefs, opinions, and so much more vanish in this distillation process—making it seem as if decisions based on that data, decisions about other people’s lives, are objective and value-neutral.
When JoAnne and Ophelia enter political venues, they expose this artificial separation. The language of researched facts that reduce three-dimensional lives to two-dimensional statistical footnotes collides with emotions and anecdotes that require no institutional seal of approval. “When we step into the room, we lift the data right up off those papers. We no longer are a line item in a state budget. We no longer are that regulation that you promulgated because that’s what the law told you to do. We are whole human beings,” JoAnne explained.
This is not a question of either-or. If tackling social issues is what’s at stake, then both data and lived experience should play an essential role in decision-making. Ophelia likens the relationship between data and lived experience to a smoke detector going off.
When my smoke detector goes off, it tells me that something’s going on here. But I still would need to call into the room: ‘Hey, son! What’s going on?’ We still need the human experience, we need the folks who are there, who are feeling it, who are experiencing it, to be informing processes every step of the way.
The alternative—the status quo of excluding the community’s voice—is untenable. JoAnne and Ophelia understand through lived experience that the current way of doing business tends to maintain rather than reduce harm. After all, governments, funders, health and social service providers have spent billions and billions over decades, and yet, 38 million people subsist in poverty. “[W]hen it comes to poverty reduction, we’ve had fifty years of nothing,” writes Desmond. (xxiii)
Listen to JoAnne speak about the shift that’s necessary to create meaningful change
Changing Narratives
The narratives we explored serve as a reminder that our beliefs and opinions drive our actions. We mold the world in the shape of our narratives—and if our narratives define a world where some people deserve to be poor and ill, where some people are seen as lesser than others, then we’ll end up creating a world that reproduces those cruel conditions daily.
This is critical to understand as a theory of systems change because it tells us that to create a kinder and gentler world, we first need to understand and challenge many of our existing cultural and political narratives. As Kate Crehan put it in explaining the power of narratives, “[f]or there to be fundamental social change, therefore, there needs to be cultural transformation.” (xxiv)
After investigating and interrogating the dominant narratives that You cannot be trusted, You are not an expert, and I cannot hear you, we found that these narratives quickly lose their footing. It becomes clear that there’s no reason to distrust or dismiss the voices of those who are experiencing or have experienced poverty and its related challenges.
Indeed, public and institutional policymakers might want to borrow from the problem-solving strategy called post-normal science (PNS), which calls for an “extended peer community” to assure quality in important decisions. Rather than solely rely on a “community of experts,” PNS argues for an “expert community” whose “extended facts” of values, beliefs, and diverse knowledge, taken together with conventional scientific facts, can inform the analysis and the solution of the problem at hand. (xxv)
As JoAnne explained, the way you begin to heal the trauma of having lived through poverty, hunger, housing insecurity, and ill health is by “creating spaces where we center those with lived experience. Provide them the resources, the tools, that they need to participate in these conversations around solutions.”
Listen to JoAnne retell how she realized that her voice and experiences were needed in spaces where policies are decided
That is why JoAnne and Ophelia are willing to share and re-live their trauma each time they step into a political space. They know that pushing questions about power, trust, authority, and morality out of view has not improved policies and has not solved the persistently high levels of poverty in the nation. To borrow from Sandel, “[t]hey rightly sense that the absence of robust public debate does not mean that no policies are being decided. It simply means they are being decided elsewhere, out of public view.” (xxvi)
But if the goal is to build institutions and create policies that improve the lives of people, then decision-makers must prioritize the creation of inviting and inclusive spaces where the personal and lived experiences of people who are closest to the problem can inform solutions. As JoAnne framed it, “Empower? I don’t need anybody to give me power. My voice, my story is powerful enough.”
Listen to JoAnne explain why ‘shared power’ and not ‘empowerment’ is what’s necessary for change
Written by Andras Ferencz
Edited by Kaara Kallen
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i Crehan, K. (2016). Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives. Duke University Press, p.47.
ii Pew Research Center (2014). Emerging and Developing Economies Much More Optimistic than Rich Countries about the Future.[online] Pew Research Center. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-developing-economies-much-more-optimistic-than-rich-countries-about-the-future/ [Accessed 25 Aug. 2024].
iii Sandel, M.J. (2020). The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.34.
iv Sandel, M.J. (2020). The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.146.
v Sandel, M.J. (2020). The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.147.
vi Anderson, Elizabeth S. (2021). What Is the Point of Equality? Ethics, 109(2), pp.287–337.
vii A. Shrider, E. and Creamer, J. (2023). Poverty in the United States: 2022. [online] Census.gov. United States Census Bureau. Available at: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-280.pdf [Accessed 25 Aug. 2024].
viii Obama, B. (2014). Remarks at the White House College Opportunity Summit. [Transcript] Available at: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-white-house-college-opportunity-summit [Accessed 25 Aug. 2024].
ix Sandel, M.J. (2020). The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.96.
x Sandel, M.J. (2020). The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.20.
xi Crehan, K. (2016). Gramsci’s Common Sense Inequality and Its Narratives. Duke University Press, pp.61–62.
xii Desmond, M. (2023). Poverty, by America. Crown, p.40.
xiii Desmond, M. (2023). Poverty, by America. Crown, p.78.
xiv Desmond, M. (2023). Poverty, by America. Crown, p.120.
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xvi Natividad, I. (2021). To End White Supremacy, Attack Racist Policy, Not People. [online] Berkeley News. Available at: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/01/25/to-end-white-supremacy-attack-racist-policy-not-people/ [Accessed 25 Aug. 2024].
xvii Sandel, M.J. (2020). The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.99.
xviii Frank, T. (2016). Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? Metropolitan Books, p.39.
xix Schaeffer, K. (2023). Nearly All Members of the 118th Congress Have a Bachelor’s Degree — And Most Have a Graduate Degree, Too. [online] Pew Research Center. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/02/nearly-all-members-of-the-118th-congress-have-a-bachelors-degree-and-most-have-a-graduate-degree-too/ [Accessed 25 Aug. 2024].
xx US Census Bureau (2023). Census Bureau Releases New Educational Attainment Data. [online] Census.gov. Available at: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/educational-attainment-data.html [Accessed 24 Aug. 2024].
xxi Sandel, M.J. (2020). The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.101.
xxii Markovits, D. (2019). The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. New York: Penguin Press, p.54.
xxiii Desmond, M. (2023). Poverty, by America. Crown, p.26.
xxiv Crehan, K. (2016). Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives. Duke University Press, p.55.
xxv D’Alisa, G., Demaria, F. and Kallis, G. (2015). Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. New York: Routledge, pp.185–188.
xxvi Sandel, M.J. (2020). The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.29.