Poverty constructions and discursive strategies employed by participants in the Finnish Basic Income Experiment

Abstract

In this article, we examine how eighty-one participants in the Finnish Basic Income Experiment discursively construct and make sense of their own and others’ poverty in face-to-face interviews. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we identified three discursive strategies the interviewees use to engage with and challenge culturally dominant poverty discourses. First, poverty was constructed as a tragic experience attributed to external causes beyond individual control, such as precarious labour markets and governmental policies. Second, poverty was managed discursively through explicit and implicit moral judgements about other welfare recipients, which also highlighted the speakers’ own moral values regarding responsibility and self-sufficiency. Third, some interviewees discursively constructed their low-income status as a personal and deliberate choice to live an intentionally modest, sustainable or ‘deviant’ lifestyle. Overall, our results reveal how ideologically controversial sociopolitical experiments create a particular argumentative context in which poverty talk is constructed.