BOOK REVIEW: COVID-19 Collaborations: Researching Poverty and Low-Income Family Life during the Pandemic

Bringing together an array of contributors, in COVID-19 Collaborations: Researching Poverty and Low-Income Family Life During the Pandemic, editors Kayleigh Garthwaite, Rosalie Warnock, Anna Tarrant, Maddy Power, and Ruth Patrick present a poignant collection of pandemic experiences. This very current compilation serves as both a guide for navigating the next crisis and an informative analysis of the pandemic’s effects. In the United Kingdom, there are about 14.5 million individuals who are poor and a comparable number receive public assistance. That represents about 22 percent of the population. However, when it comes to making decisions about public policy and engaging in debate, the works collected in this volume underline that this group of people is all too frequently seen as a single homogeneous mass. COVID-19 Collaborations examines the lives of people who are classified as being of “poor income,” assessing their performance before the epidemic when the lockdown was at its worst and following the transition to the “new normal” in 2021. The book does this by refuting the generalizations that are prevalent in public discourse about people with low earnings and confronts the reality of the stigmatization this group endures. The focus of the collection is the “COVID-19 and Family members on a Low Income: Investigating Together” collective, that is simply one part of the wider “Covid Realities” research initiative—which was supported by the Nuffield Foundation to record the experiences of families with low incomes during the pandemic. Over 4,000 parents and caregivers from all around the United Kingdom participated in this federation.