Series: Rethinking Community Development
Series editors: Mae Shaw, University of Edinburgh, UK, Rosie R. Meade, University College Cork, Ireland, and Sarah Banks, University of Durham, UK.
Rethinking Community Development is an international book series that offers the opportunity for a critical re-evaluation of community development – to rethink what community development means in theory and practice. It is intended to draw together international, cross-generational and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Contextual specificity will be used as a lens through which to explore the localised consequences of wider, global processes.
Rethinking Community Development
How do local communities effectively build peace and reconciliation before, during and after open violence? This trailblazing book gives practical examples, from the Global North, the former Soviet bloc and Global South, on communities addressing conflict in divided and contested societies.
The book draws on a range of critical perspectives and practitioner analysis. The diverse case studies demonstrate the considerable knowledge, skills, commitment, courage and relationships within local communities that a critical community development approach can support and encourage.
Concluding with activists’ perspectives on working with the challenges of violence, the book offers insights for both an understanding of the root causes of conflict and for bottom-up peacebuilding.
Young people are often at the forefront of democratic activism, whether self-organised or supported by youth workers and community development professionals. Focusing on youth activism for greater equality, liberty and mutual care – radical democracy – this timely collection explores the movement’s impacts on community organisations and workers. Essays from the Global North and Global South cover the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental activism and the struggles of refugees.
At a time of huge global challenges, youth participation is a dynamic lens through which all community development scholars and participants can rethink their approaches.
How and why are arts and cultural practices meaningful to communities?
Highlighting examples from Lebanon, Latin America, China, Ireland, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, this exciting book explores the relationship between the arts, culture and community development.
Academics and practitioners from six continents discuss how diverse communities understand, re-imagine or seek to change personal, cultural, social, economic or political conditions while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement.
Investigating the theory and practice of ‘cultural democracy’, this book explores a range of aesthetic forms including song, music, muralism, theatre, dance, and circus arts.
Using international perspectives and case studies, this book discusses the relationships between community development and populism in the context of today’s widespread crisis of democracy.
It investigates the development, meanings and manifestations of contemporary forms of populism and explores the synergies and contradictions between the values and practices of populism and community development.
Contributors examine the ways that the ascendancy of right-wing populist politics is influencing the landscapes within which community development is located and they offer new insights on how the field can understand and respond to the challenges of populism.
Struggles for environmental justice involve communities mobilising against powerful forces which advocate ‘development’, driven increasingly by neoliberal imperatives. In doing so, communities face questions about their alliances with other groups, working with outsiders and issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender, worker/community and settler/indigenous relationships.
Written by a wide range of international scholars and activists, contributors explore these dynamics and the opportunities for agency and solidarity. They critique the practice of community development professionals, academics, trade union organisers, social movements and activists and inform those engaged in the pursuit of justice as community, development and environment interact.
This book offers a unique focus on the everyday ethics of community development practice in the context of local and global struggles for equity and social justice.
Contributors from around the world (from India to the Netherlands and USA) grapple with ethical dilemmas and tensions, including how to: respect and learn from Indigenous values and philosophies; challenge environmental destruction; gain consent in divided communities; maintain or breach professional boundaries; and develop new paradigms for transformative community organising, sustainable development and ethically-sensitive practice.
Offering theoretical frameworks, philosophical perspectives and practical case examples (from sex worker collectives to tree action groups and Australian Indigenous communities) this book is essential reading for community-based practitioners, students and academics.
This edited collection critically explores the funding arrangements governing contemporary community development and how they shape its theory and practice.
International contributions from activists, practitioners and academics consider the evolution of funding in community development and how changes in policy and practice can be understood in relation to the politics of neoliberalism and contemporary efforts to build global democracy from the ‘bottom up’.
Thematically, the collection explores matters such as popular democracy, the shifting contours of the state-market relationship, prospects for democratising the state, the feasibility of community autonomy, the effects of managerialism and hybrid modes of funding such as social finance.
The collection is thus uniquely positioned to stimulate critical debate on both policy and practice within the broad field of community development.
This book, the second title in the Rethinking Community Development series, starts from concern about increasing inequality worldwide and the re-emergence of community development in public policy debates.
It argues for the centrality of class analysis and its associated divisions of power to any discussion of the potential benefits of community development. It proposes that, without such an analysis, community development can simply mask the underlying causes of structural inequality. It may even exacerbate divisions between groups competing for dwindling public resources in the context of neoliberal globalisation.
Reflecting on their own contexts, a wide range of contributors from across the global north and south explore how an understanding of social class can offer ways forward in the face of increasing social polarisation. The book considers class as a dynamic and contested concept and examines its application in policies and practices past and present. These include local/global and rural/urban alliances, community organising, ecology, gender and education.
The increasing impact of neoliberalism across the globe means that a complex interplay of democratic, economic and managerial rationalities now frame the parameters and practices of community development. This book explores how contemporary politics, and the power relations it reflects and projects, is shaping the field today.
This first title in the timely Rethinking Community Development series presents unique and critical reflections on policy and practice in Taiwan, Australia, India, South Africa, Burundi, Germany, the USA, Ireland, Malawi, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazonia and the UK. It addresses the global dominance of neoliberalism, and the extent to which practitioners, activists and programmes can challenge, critique, engage with or resist its influence.
Addressing key dilemmas and challenges being navigated by students, academics, professionals and activists, this is a vital intellectual and practical resource.
