Towards a Relational Approach to Agency for Mapping Pathways Into and Out of Poverty: Life Histories, 2016-2020

Global poverty looks radically different in the 21st century as climate-related events, political-religious conflicts and economic growth-inequality nexuses add to persistent forms of social exclusion based on gender, race, and class. In this uncertain and unpredictable context, we require new approaches to understand complex pathways into and out of poverty, directing attention to poor people's collective capacity to bring about transformative change i.e., their agency, as constituted by social networks and relations with nature, and mediated by science and technology. The collection deposited includes the transcripts of life history interviews with anonymised participants in south India and in Kenya. Focus of the interviews was on understanding participants' relations with modern sciences and technologies as well as with social structures. The eventual aim was to understand how these socio-material relations constitute participants' agency. All names are pseudonyms.