Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter focuses on education and participatory action research within the trade union and labour movement, with a particular emphasis on the role of ideas and the development of critical consciousness within social movements. The trade union movement has much to learn from its past engagements with colonialism, as well as from its past and more recent engagements with movements for decolonisation and racial justice.
The chapter draws from a case study of participatory action research within a British trade union. However limited in themselves, and however pressured in the current context, such initiatives have potentially wider implications with particular relevance for the promotion of equalities and international solidarity within the labour and trade union movement and within communities more widely.
This chapter explores municipal strategies in Britain and US that work with communities and social movements to tackle the legacies of slavery and colonisation while promoting decolonisation in order to advance equalities and social solidarity agendas. Examples have included initiatives to enable women and Black and ethnic minority communities to access employment and training opportunities, as well as strategies and planning processes to improve the quality of both jobs and services for communities.
In addition, there have been innovative approaches to challenging structural inequalities on an international scale through the promotion of fair trade. And there have been initiatives to promote international solidarity more locally by welcoming refugees and asylum seekers.
This final chapter reflects on the lessons outlined throughout the book in an attempt to develop holistic understandings of decolonisation in the current context. How might such reflections contribute to contemporary cultural debates and engage with culture wars more generally while recognising that the spaces for alternative approaches have been shrinking, both in Britain and beyond? Even in this environment, how might they contribute to the development of more inclusive community education and development policies and practices, facilitated by a decolonising curriculum? And how, despite their inherent limitations, might they contribute to wider strategies for social and environmental justice, racial equality and social solidarity?
This chapter explores the notion of culture itself and the role of ideas, critical consciousness and human agency in movements for social change. These are central concepts for community education and development.
This leads into the discussion of culture wars and the notion of ‘cultural Marxism’. This term has been applied as a term of abuse, but this application serves to undermine the theoretical contributions of theorists such as Raymond Williams and others whose thinking has been so central to popular education for social justice.
It is vital that we decolonise community education and development – learning from the past in order to challenge current discrimination and oppression more effectively. In this book, Marjorie Mayo identifies ways of developing more inclusive policies and practices, working towards social justice for the future. She also tackles the pervasive influence of the ‘culture wars’ undermining work in communities, including the denial of problematic colonial legacies.
Inspired by movements such as Black Lives Matter and labour solidarity, the book includes case studies from the US, UK and the Global South, outlining the lessons that can be applied to community education and development training and practice.
Whose knowledges have been predominant and whose knowledges have been devalued as a result of slavery and colonialism? What can be learnt from strategies to decolonise the curricula in other disciplines? And what might be the lessons for decolonising the curricula in community education and development studies? While there is much to learn from other disciplines, pioneering work has already been undertaken in adult community education and development too, especially in relation to participatory action research (PAR).
Having explored these questions, this chapter concludes by focusing upon different forms of knowledge, including Indigenous forms of knowledge and experiential knowledge. How might they be critically evaluated through processes of reflexive dialogue?
The focus of this chapter is on the contested histories of adult community education and development. These histories interweave with the themes of cultural wars, the development of critical consciousness and decolonisation, threads that have relevance for more recent debates about community education and development in practice.
The projects and illustrations described relate to programmes and community initiatives in the post-Civil War context in the US and the post-Second World War context in Britain’s African colonies.
The final section reflects on potential connections with more recent initiatives to address the challenges of the legacies of Black migration from the South to the cities of the North in the US and Black and Asian migrations to Britain following the Second World War.
Culture warriors have been re-enforcing rather than challenging divisive and discriminatory attitudes and behaviours, denying the significance of slavery and colonialism along with its implications for social justice agendas in the contemporary context.
These contested histories need to be faced through confronting the past in order to develop more effective strategies for change – challenging racism, discrimination and xenophobia and promoting equalities, diversity and social solidarity for the future. These ideological battles have important implications for community education and development, both in theory and in practice.
This chapter introduces the three themes that are to be explored throughout the chapters that follow: culture wars, decolonisation and the contested histories of community education and development.
This chapter explores learning from struggles for freedom and justice in South Africa, illustrating the ways in which the book’s key themes run through these experiences. South Africa had vibrant adult and community education and development programmes, including those developed via the Black Consciousness Movement. These creatively engaged with community and social movement activists, focusing on learning for decolonisation for the future.
The chapter concludes with an examination of more recent initiatives, including holistic programmes to address environmental sustainability, gender equality and social justice in the very different circumstances of post-apartheid South Africa. Here too, decolonisation emerges as a key theme and an ongoing process in the pursuit of social transformation and solidarity, demonstrating the continuing importance of working together for a sustainable future.
Cultural strategies can engage with people’s emotions, building empathetic understandings through the arts. Museums and galleries can offer unique insights, for example, reaching the parts that other forms of knowledge fail to reach. Other art forms offer similar possibilities for promoting more holistic ways of knowing and feeling, providing tools for use as part of a decolonising curriculum for community education and development.
Films can stimulate critical discussion, for example, exploring the colonial past and its legacies, as well as raising troubling questions about the roots of contemporary communal conflicts. And novels can provide examples of racism and resistance in Britain or elsewhere, including the US and Britain’s former colonies, raising significant questions for community education and community development in their turn.
