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The book Artisans of Democracy is an anthology of 12 vivid stories, derived from the experience of the International Movement Fourth World. Each story is told from a variety of viewpoints - those of the different actors involved - and is followed by the findings of the authors. As the stories unfold, the reader is presented with an amazing picture of the activity of the Movement - building alliances between excluded families and institutions, creating social networks, transforming individual careers, reframing policies and institutional agendas. The book may be defined, and certainly used, as a manual for social action: a thesaurus of ‘actionable knowledge’ on poverty and exclusion and the art to overcome it, relevant to the practice of social workers, educators, civil activists, public administrators, politicians and citizens. It is not a prescriptive, instructive text, but rather a dialogic and analytical one, inviting the reader to empathize with and reflect upon the experience of the activists and allies of the Fourth World Movement.
But the book is more than that, in form and content, it is a challenge to the established perspective on social status, poverty and exclusion. It challenges a bulk of constructs, rooted in culture and taken for granted: the common sense explanations of poverty, the mainstream language of human rights and political activism, and some of the core notions of social science, underlying the practice of welfare bureaucracies. The 12 stories implicitly introduce an alternative interpretative framework, bringing into focus the relational dimension of the phenomenon of extreme poverty. This relational perspective breaks through the conceptual impasse of the dominant explanations of poverty and the ensuing strategies to cope with it. What is transcended is the inherent