In late 2011, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government announced the launch of a new programme on ‘troubled families’ – a term used to describe the estimated 120,000 most behaviourally anti-social families in England and Wales. To many social scientists, this appeared to be yet another reconstruction of the broad ‘underclass’ concept that has run like a thread of analysis through UK poverty discourses over the last 150 years. The symbolic nature and coded meanings of this particular concept of poverty are very interesting, as is the way it has been reconstructed periodically. This paper summarises these reconstructions, and the analytical issues raised by them: the ‘residuum’ concept of the 1880–1914 period; the ‘social problem group’ of the inter-war years; the ‘problem family’ of the 1940s and 1950s; the ‘cycle of deprivation’ of the 1970s; and the ‘underclass’ of the 1980s and 1990s.

Gunnar Myrdal’s 1963 notion of the bottom of society is now over fifty years old and we still know virtually nothing about of the people living at that bottom or the people living there on incomes far below the federal poverty line. Since Blacks are, as always, proportionally the prime victims, the dreadful possibility of a Black population permanently at the bottom of society cannot be ruled out. This article discusses some of the questions researchers must answer to obtain an informed understanding of their problems and needs, as well as of the policies and politics, if any, that could help them.

This essay explores some social ramifications of two portraits of low-income African American New Orleanians that proliferated throughout the country since the arrival of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast. The dissemination of these portraits reveals much about America's cultural understandings of African Americans and urban poverty. Some recent ethnographic and qualitative-methodological work has striven to create new depictions of this constituency, but a divide persists between general-public readings of the African American urban poor and those of liberal-minded field researchers who have studied this population. This essay concludes with some reflection on issues concerning the potential for this research to bridge the divide, given the power of mainstream media outlets to construct and promote certain images of disadvantaged and disenfranchised social groups relative to the social power of academic scholarship to achieve the same end.