also campaigns to fight government cuts that have affected the area. We have set up a People’s Pantry to provide a more dignified response to food poverty. We work with local schools to fix their playgrounds up with art projects. We run an annual anti-racist festival to combat racism, which is now the biggest in Scotland. And the building itself is so important to the wider community; it’s not just bricks and mortar. We started off as a community campaign to save the building, and the community have kept fighting for more. Ninety per cent of the work we do at the
Issues of displacement and dispossession have become defining characteristics of a globalised 21st century. People are moving within and across national borders, whether displaced, relocated or moving in search of better livelihoods.
This book brings theoretical understandings of migration and displacement together with empirical illustrations of the creative, cultural ways in which communities reflect upon their experiences of change, and how they respond, including through poetry and story-telling, photography and other art forms, exploring the scope for building communities of solidarity and social justice.
The concluding chapters identify potential implications for policy and professional practice to promote communities of solidarity, addressing the structural causes of widening inequalities, taking account of different interests, including those related to social class, gender, ethnicity, age, ability and faith.
Making spaces for community development offers an account of the key changes to the context and practice of community development since the 1970s, told through the experiences and insights of a group of highly experienced practitioners. The book, intended for those practising and interested in practising community development today, focuses on dilemmas arising from the shift to partnership working from a more confrontational model, and the professionalisation of the field.
Bringing together a wealth of experience and knowledge from across areas of play and youth work through to the environment, community enterprise, race equality, immigration and housing, the book raises key questions for contemporary debates and current practice.
This book presents the findings of a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project into urban austerity governance in eight cities across the world (Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Melbourne, Dublin, Leicester, Montréal and Nantes). It offers comparative reflections on the myriad experiences of collaborative governance and its limitations.
An international collaborative from across the social sciences, the book discusses ways that citizens, activists and local states collaborate and come into conflict in attempting to build just cities. It examines the development of egalitarian collaborative governance strategies, provides innovative ideas and tools to extend emancipatory governance practices and shows hopeful possibilities for cities beyond austerity and neoliberalism.
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.
Neoliberalism and austerity have led to a growing inequality gap and increasing levels of poverty and social harm. In this short form book, part of the Critical and Radical Debates in Social Work series, Chris Jones and Tony Novak look at consequences of poverty and inequality and the challenge they pose to the engaged social work academic and practitioner. There are many studies of poverty that look at competing definitions (and some of the consequences) of poverty in modern society. Here the authors argue that, especially for a profession with a claimed commitment to values based on equality, social justice and meeting human need, poverty and immiserisation impose a requirement on social workers to speak out and not to collude with social policies that make the plight of the impoverished even harder and their lives even worse.
This book is the first specifically to explore methodological issues relating to the involvement of refugees in both service evaluation and development and research more generally. It builds on a two-year seminar series funded by the ESRC and attended by members of a range of statutory and voluntary organisations, as well as academics and refugees themselves. The participants jointly drew up a set of good practice guidelines that are re-produced in the book for the first time.
Key features include a focus on the methodology for active involvement of refugees; a discussion of barriers to involvement; suggestions for overcoming barriers; analysis of existing practices and ideas for change and a discussion of the implications for policy, research and practice.
Doing research with refugees is essential reading for anyone working with in the field. This includes academics, researchers, health and social care providers and voluntary organisations. Refugees themselves who are interested in their role in service evaluation, development and research will also find the book of interest.
This book offers a critical perspective on the issue of organising waste in cities, which has often been positioned in terms of relatively narrow engineering, economic and physical science approaches. It emphasises the ways in which the notion of waste, and the narratives and discourses associated with it, have been socially constructed with corresponding implications for waste governance and local waste handling practices.
Organising waste in the city takes a broad and international approach to the ways in which the issue of waste is framed, and brings together narratives from cities as diverse as Amsterdam, Bristol, Cairo, Gothenburg, Helsingborg and Managua. Organised into four main sections and with an integrative introduction and conclusion, the book not only provides new insights into the hidden stories of urban and municipal household solid waste and waste landscapes, but also connects concerns regarding urban waste to such issues as globalisation, governance, urban ecology, and social, economic and environmental justice.
This important book is the first edited collection to provide an up to date and comprehensive overview of the third sector’s role in public service delivery. Exploring areas such as social enterprise, capacity building, volunteering and social value, the authors provide a platform for academic and policy debates on the topic. Drawing on research carried out at the ESRC funded Third Sector Research Centre, the book charts the historical development of the state-third sector relationship, and reviews the major debates and controversies accompanying recent shifts in that relationship. It is a valuable resource for social science academics and postgraduate students as well as policymakers and practitioners in the public and third sectors in fields such as criminal justice, health, housing and social care.
In the past decade community groups have been portrayed as the solution to many social problems. Yet the role of ‘below the regulatory radar’ community action has received little research attention and thus is poorly understood in terms of both policy and practice.
Focusing on self-organised community activity, this book offers the first collection of papers developing theoretical and empirically grounded knowledge of the informal, unregistered, yet largest, part of the voluntary sector. The collection includes work from leading academics, activists, policy makers and practitioners offering a new and coherent understanding of community action ‘below the radar’.
The book is part of the Third Sector Research Series which is informed by research undertaken at the Third Sector Research Centre, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and Barrow Cadbury Trust.
