Poverty as Biography in Motion: Agency, Emotion, and the Limits of Contemporary Poverty Theory

Despite extensive research, poverty remains theoretically under-explained. Dominant approaches oscillate between structural, resource-based models that conceptualise poverty as a measurable condition, and behavioural or responsibilisation accounts that locate persistence in individual conduct. Whilst often treated as opposing theses, this article argues that both rest on a shared theoretical error: the mis-specification of agency as either absent or over-moralised. As a result, poverty is rendered static, episodic, or behaviourally deficient, limiting the capacity of theory to explain endurance, stalling, and fragile change across lives. The article advances a different ontological starting point by reconceptualising poverty as a temporal, emotional, and biographical process. Drawing on feminist sociology, life-course theory, and narrative perspectives, it introduces the concept of poverty as biography in motion, alongside a trajectory-based analytic that theorises turbulence, stalling, and fragile progress as patterned temporal forms of constraint. Central to this framework is the treatment of emotion as a mediating mechanism through which structural conditions are lived, and agency is exercised over time. By reframing agency as situated, relational, and emotionally mediated, the article moves beyond entrenched binaries between structure and behaviour. It offers a theoretical grammar capable of explaining poverty's persistence and uneven movement without reverting to static or moralised accounts. In doing so, the article contributes to poverty theory by reorienting explanation toward lived process, duration, and mediation, and by foregrounding biography as a central site of sociological analysis.