Women's 'Stories': The emotional consequences of long-term and persistent poverty in childhood and the shaping of women's lives.

This project aims to
- Explore the sociology of emotions as means to understand the lived experience of poverty and the potential it has to form a bridge between the structure-agency divide within sociology.
- Explore the emotional histories and realities of women that have endured poverty during childhood to understand the ways this has influenced, enabled, or constrained their lives.
- Understand the implications of what others have termed 'critical moments' of decision-making across the life-course.

By working within the ontological and epistemological imbrication of critical realist and feminist standpoint perspectives, this study will further understandings of how women's lives progress as they encounter the structural forces governing poverty. In particular, it will explore how their experiences are emotionally internalised and externalised as decisionmaking at critical moments where divergent trajectories are available. By taking a narrative
approach this research will present women's 'stories' of experiencing poverty during childhood, drawing on their experiential position thorough life-history interviews and journaling. The sociology of emotions is a useful lens to understand lived experiences of poverty but has not yet been fully explored. It therefore offers the potential to confront dominant, fatalistic explanations of poverty for women by understanding their decisionmaking in its emotional context. By developing a conceptual and methodological approach for understanding the gendered relationship between poverty and emotions across the lifecourse, this study will produce critical new knowledge in response to an urgent social and political issue and provide a more humanistic and agentic alternative to deterministic or pathologised accounts of women's poverty.