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In this chapter we trace the contribution of geographers to the re-imagination of religion and belief. Any claim that Geography has made such a contribution may come as something of a surprise to scholars both outside and inside Geography, given the staunchly secular nature of most geographical endeavour in which acceptance of religion and faith as a legitimate focus for study has been one of the last great areas of otherness that geographers have had to address. For much of its academic history, Human Geography has included a self-contained strand of research about religious spaces (particularly in the US) and in addition has recognised the contributions to wider scholarship from high-profile and self-identifying Christians (such as Lily Kong, David Livingstone and David Ley). More generally, however, the discipline has tended to equate religion with colonising practices of war, violence and proselytisation rather than as a potential contributor to politically progressive or theoretically interesting aspects of space, society and environment.
We identify at least three forms of inquisitiveness that have begun to change this rather skewed pattern. First, from positions outside of Geography, theologians and philosophers of religion have begun to interrogate geographical concepts in order to pose serious questions about space and place; Kim Knott (2005, 2008), for example, has explored specifically geographical ideas in her accounts of the theorisation of spaces and places of religion, belief and politics, and of the utility of spatial metaphors in religious and political discourse. In so doing, inherently geographical discussions about how places and landscapes are infused with social and cultural meaningfulness have attracted the interest of a wider body of scholars of religion.
The introduction summarises the chapter contributions that constitute the volume as a whole. It includes the research findings of the FACIT project, including methodologies and case studies, to explore the current role of FBOs in matters of poverty and social exclusion. The issues the volume addresses consist of the developing role of FBOs, the implications for policies and governance of European cities and the topicality of the volume.
The research illustrates that the phenomenon of FBOs is complex but fascinating. Different factors such as the state, society and religion all play a part. They provide eight propositions from the summary of the findings.
This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach to examine the role of FBOs in overcoming poverty and social exclusion in European cities. At a time of uniquely European controversies and neoliberal globalisation, this volume explores the defining relations of FBOs and contains sectoral studies to explore how FBOs are growing in importance in the provision of social services in the European urban context. This seminal book is an essential reference source for academics studying social policy, sociology, geography, politics, urban studies and theology/religious studies.
This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach to examine the role of FBOs in overcoming poverty and social exclusion in European cities. At a time of uniquely European controversies and neoliberal globalisation, this volume explores the defining relations of FBOs and contains sectoral studies to explore how FBOs are growing in importance in the provision of social services in the European urban context. This seminal book is an essential reference source for academics studying social policy, sociology, geography, politics, urban studies and theology/religious studies.
At a time of heightened neoliberal globalisation and crisis, welfare state retrenchment and desecularisation of society, amid uniquely European controversies over immigration, integration and religious-based radicalism, this timely book explores the role played by faith-based organisations (FBOs), which are growing in importance in the provision of social services in the European context.
Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the contributions to the volume present original research examples and a pan-European perspective to assess the role of FBOs in combating poverty and various expressions of exclusion and social distress in cities across Europe.
This significant and highly topical volume should become a vital reference source for the burgeoning number of studies that are likely follow and will make essential reading for students and academics in social policy, sociology, geography, politics, urban studies and theology/ religious studies.
English
This article traces the power of numbers in discourses relating to homelessness in Britain. It argues that enumeration has played a formative role in the recording of homelessness as a ‘problem’, and in the public policy response to homelessness in specific locations. In particular,the use of rough sleeper counts as popular defining representations of the problem of, and response to, homelessness is analysed in terms of their wider pivotal significance in political and policy discourses relating to homeless people. The article concludes that how rough sleeper counts are undertaken has clear distorting consequences for the identification and understanding of to what extent, where, and among whom homelessness represents a pressing social issue. Discursive valorisation of enumeration needs to be interconnected critically with other more qualitative forms of knowledge drawing on the experience of housing officers, local agency workers and others dealing with localised homelessness on a day-to-day basis.
It has been documented that there are four times as many animal shelters in this country as there are shelters for battered women. While emergency shelters do very important work, there are not enough of them to provide shelter to everyone knocking on their doors. For every homeless person you see on a street corner, there are another nine homeless people you don’t see. People using couches for makeshift beds in the homes of friends and relatives, two or three families sharing a mobile home meant for just one, people living in substandard housing, people living in their cars, people living outside in parks, campgrounds and primitive wooded areas. The list goes on and on. (Stoops, in Lewallen, 1998, p 9)
This book is about some of the 9 out of 10 homeless people you do not see – those living in rural areas. In terms of numbers, the hidden rural homeless cannot ‘compete’ with those in urban areas, and by adopting a rural focus in this book we in no way seek to underestimate or undermine the significance of issues faced by homeless people in various urban situations. However, we do want to claim loudly and clearly that rural homelessness exists as an important, but often invisible, social issue of our time. If you read this claim as a statement of the obvious, then you are probably one of a relatively small minority of people who recognise that homelessness is not confined to the sites and sights of the city. Not knowing about rural homelessness is entirely forgivable.
Having set out the context of rural homelessness in Chapter One, we now want to discuss some key methodological issues bound up with researching homelessness in rural areas. This chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, we provide a critical review of the methodologies associated with recent academic studies of homelessness, drawing on research conducted both in Britain and in the US. The second focuses more specifically on rural homelessness and considers the ways in which the small number of studies undertaken have approached the subject. We also set out here the approach taken by the authors in their recently completed study of homelessness in rural England, and provide details of the main objectives, methodologies and products of this research. In the final section, we present a reflexive account of a range of ethical issues associated with researching rural homelessness, based on diary notes and research summaries provided by each member of the research team.
Any review of the large number of academic books and journal articles written on homelessness will reveal that the subject does not lend itself to easy research. In many ways, the complexities of definition discussed in Chapter One carry through into the process of researching homelessness. For example, a narrow definition of homelessness as rooflessness will tend to be associated with a research methodology that is different from one that would be utilised if a broader definition – encompassing a range of different housing situations – were to be adopted. Similarly, a normative definition of homelessness based on official statistical categorisations may necessitate a different methodological approach to one that relies on a definition of homelessness produced by homeless people themselves.
In this chapter we explore some of the difficulties in bringing together the concepts of rurality and homelessness, arguing that particular cultural constructs of what it is to be homeless, and what it is to live in the countryside, serve to resist, and sometimes deny the recognition of any material reality which might be called rural homelessness. The background to this discussion is formed by the existence of privileged constructs of rural space. It can be suggested that the most identifiable and accessible group of meanings constructed and circulated about rurality in England are bound up with notions of idyll. Although it is problematic to search for any notion of a single construction of the rural as idyll1, Cloke and Milbourne (1992) have suggested a number of key meanings that have come to be associated with rurality – “a bucolic, problem-free, hidden world of peace, tranquillity and proximity to the natural” (p 361). Such constructs have become reproduced directly within the dominant imagination through a range of different cultural circulations. In other ways, notions of rural idyll, and particularly ideas of problem-free country spaces, have remained largely unchallenged within academic and policy discourses. Only a handful of academic studies have addressed issues of poverty and marginalisation in rural Britain (Cloke et al, 1994, 1997a, 1997b; Shucksmith et al, 1996; PSI, 1998), and these same issues have been conspicuous only by their absence within recent central policy documents on rural Britain (DoE, 1995;Welsh Office, 1996).
Such constructions of rurality have played a key role in reproducing dominant popular discourses on the British countryside.
