Hutton, M. (2018) “Relative Poverty in Responsible Marketing Education”, PRME Champions Global Forum: Learning and Teaching on the SDGs, INCAE Business School, Costa Rica, 10 October: Relative Poverty in Responsible Marketing Education

Ending poverty in all forms everywhere is a key message of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 1), yet many business and management classrooms remain silent on the multiple, overlapping inequalities created by relative poverty in particular. Drawing on critical education scholarship, this paper argues that in order to imbue students with a more nuanced understanding of the challenges relative poverty presents a new learning approach is required - one which is unsettling and deliberately challenging to reflect the troubling realities we face. This paper introduces a discomforting pedagogy framework to illustrate this approach, organised around a three-dimensional view of relative poverty: discourses, representations and vulnerabilities. As an educational practice, discomforting pedagogy attempts to interrupt normalising discourses to encourage authentic learning and positively reframe language and representations associated with social justice issues. In developed countries, where the majority of those we educate are more privileged than those who suffer relative poverty in society, this paper considers the merits of a disruptive pedagogical approach in awakening a sense of injustice in students thus broadening their knowledge of poverty in all its relative forms and manifestations.