"When I grow up, I want to be a quote by G.B. Shaw" : the ideological biography of a stick kid (and some photos in her family album) : an honors thesis (HONRS 499)

Abstract

For decades, the challenges of poverty, homelessness, and hunger have baffled many kinds of people. As subjects, these challenges are endlessly studied, picked apart, and put back together in the form of statistics, perhaps, or volumes of books. However, statistics can serve conceal the individual lives of people in poverty situations, and sometimes the study of poverty can do as much harm as good, fostering the creation of "us and them" binaries, inadvertently insulating those who research from the actual experiences of hunger, need, or homelessness. Based on "Voice and Vision: Poverty from the Inside Out," a seminar experience at the Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, my thesis is a collection of creative nonfiction stories detailing human experiences with poverty of various kinds. Culminating in a manifesto, it presents the continuing ideological development of one young individual, myself, and explores the ways people are changed, shaped, and bound together by the act of telling and hearing each others' stories.