‘Personal’ troubles and public spaces: the community as a site of care and social action

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-623
Author(s):  
Mags Crean
Keyword(s):  
Community Development ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Community Level ◽  
Class Inequality ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Community Activists ◽  
Social Class Inequality ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Affective Relations

Abstract The crisis in community development in Ireland has been discussed by community workers, academics and equality experts. This article contributes to this analysis with empirical research encompassing the voice of people living with inequality, including a number of community activists. The research shows how affective relations take precedence in women’s discussions about social class inequality and activism at a community level. Yet, this everyday concern with the affective is not given a legitimate status in academic and political discourse about community development. It is argued that this depoliticization of affective relations is part of the crisis in community development when it fails to incorporate a political analysis of what matters most to people at a community level.

Breaking the silence: community radio, women, and empowerment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette Rimmer
Keyword(s):  
Community Development ◽  
Social Action ◽  
White Male ◽  
Feminist Pedagogy ◽  
Community Radio ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
Culture Of Silence ◽  
A Site ◽  
Development Methods

Abstract The article argues that community development work, in the form of feminist pedagogy and community radio, can engage more women in technological roles, aid women’s confidence and mental health and possibly, improve diversity in mainstream media. In UK media, corporations are heavily criticized for their under and misrepresentation of women and, in general, their inability to engage with excluded groups. The BBC’s strategic aim is to improve inclusion and diversity by 2020. The article asserts the value of community development methods in efforts to address this. It explores concepts of voice poverty and empowerment through analysis of the narratives of twelve female community radio volunteers in Northern England. Using Freire’s (1972) notion of ‘culture of silence’ and against the backdrop of gender inequality, the article clarifies the nature of community radio and employs a variety of literatures to understand how a feminist pedagogy (hooks, 1994) and an intersectional approach (Crenshaw, 1989) might be useful in media. It builds from Stuart Hall’s contention that media and cultural spaces can be powerful sites of social action. Analysis of participant accounts indicates that community radio is a site of diverse identities, laughter, dialogue, raised consciousness, and conflict. This confronts not only the orthodoxy of young white, male-dominated media but also challenges romantic notions of community harmony and happiness by recognizing inherent tensions within prevailing conceptions of womanhood and within and between communities. The article foregrounds evidence from the majority world, where community radio is well documented as giving voice to invisiblized women, and concludes with an argument for further exploration of this highly symbolic dimension of empowerment, whereby women overcome technological fears and break their silence by broadcasting diverse voices. The project challenges UK commercial and public broadcasters to learn from the global south that community radio is an effective method of development with potential to enrich the mainstream media world.

scholarly journals Interruptions: Affective futures and uncanny presences at Giemaš, Finnmark

Polar Record ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Elisabeth Lien
Keyword(s):  
Open Pit ◽  
Open Pit Mining ◽  
Mining Company ◽  
Mining Site ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Migratory Movement ◽  
A Site ◽  
Affective Relations ◽  
North Norway

Abstract This paper concerns affective relations and unexpected interruptions as the planned expansion of an extractive open-pit mining site gathers momentum. The site is a mountain in Varanger, North Norway, criss-crossed by a sand-coloured meshwork of roads that are part of the current infrastructure of a quartzite quarry. Recently purchased by Chinese investors, the mining company Elkem plans a massive expansion of the operations, which will interrupt a wide range of practices and projects, including the migratory movement of reindeer, as well as their grazing patterns. Known as Giemaš amongst Sámi speakers, the mountain is also alluded to as a site of other powers, manifesting as unexpected accidents. In this article, I explore how the planned expansion evokes this contested site as more than a singular mountain, and how divergent epistemic formations interrupt the making of extractive resources in multiple ways.

scholarly journals Social justice and provision for children with additional support needs in Scotland

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Riddell ◽  
Elisabet Weedon
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Educational Outcomes ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Support Needs ◽  
Class Inequality ◽  
Scottish Parliament ◽  
Family Case ◽  
Social Class Inequality ◽  
Additional Support ◽  
High Level

Since the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, successive administrations have reaffirmed their commitment to social justice. However, despite high-level equality policies, social-class inequality is a major feature of Scottish society, affecting all social policy domains, including education. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the development of support for children with learning difficulties and disabilities within the context of Scottish comprehensive schooling. We then consider the way in which ideas of social justice are reflected in education for learners with additional support needs, whose numbers have expanded over recent years and who are particularly likely to live in the most deprived parts of Scotland. Using family case studies, we explore the experiences of families from different social backgrounds, whose children have been identified as having additional support needs. The data suggest that children living in deprived areas experience cumulative disadvantage, attracting stigmatising labels without the benefit of extra resources necessary to improve educational outcomes. By way of contrast, those from more advantaged areas are generally more successful in avoiding stigmatising labels while ensuring that facilitating resources are in place. Findings are discussed within Fraser’s three-dimensional framework of social justice, encompassing distribution, recognition and representation.

scholarly journals The Gaols of Guyana: Hauntology and Trauma in the soundscape of Prison

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tammy Ayres ◽  
Dylan Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Economic System ◽  
Intergenerational Transmission ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Intergenerational Transmission Of Trauma ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Transmission Of Trauma ◽  
The Impact

Using Hauntology, this paper illustrates how the supposed demise of a socio-political and economic system – colonialism – still impacts on and has something to offer contemporary political analysis in Guyana’s gaols. Drawing on Fiddler’s spatio-hauntology alongside the work of Derrida and Gordon this paper shows how hauntology provides an alternative theoretical framework to look at the intergenerational transmission of trauma, which can be traced back to colonialism and slavery. It acknowledges the impact structural violence has on the collective imaginary and how this – consciously and unconsciously – shapes the psychosocial material underpinning contemporary Guyanese identities, desires, experiences, social action, and systems of punishment which includes prisons – its buildings, space, regimes, processes, sounds, laws and rationale. Guyana’s prisons contain phantoms of the past. Only by acknowledging Guyana’s ghosts and the phantasm of past trauma is it that we can begin to understand contemporary Guyana and Guyanese society, which includes their jails.

scholarly journals A Dialogue on the Constructions of GLBT and Queer Ethos: “I Belong to a Culture That Includes …”

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Jane Hoogestraat ◽  
Hillery Glasby
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Community Level ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Normal Heart ◽  
Rhetorical Agency ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Yom Kippur ◽  
A Site

Invoking a dialogue between two scholars, authors Jane Hoogestraat and Hillery Glasby discuss the exigence for, construction of, and differentiation between LGBT and queer ethos. Drawing from Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and the construction of a gay identity, the text explores connections between queer theory, LGBT(Q) ethos, and queer futurity, ultimately arguing for a more nuanced and critical understanding of the undecidability and performativity of LGBT and queer ethos. In framing LGBT and queer ethos as being at the same time a self and socially constructed and mediated—legitimate and illegitimate—ethos can be understood not only as a site for rhetorical agency, but also as an orientation and a form of activism. Finally, the text offers a case study of Adrienne Rich’s “Yom Kippur,” which is a poem that offers a queer (and) Jewish perspective on identity—from an individual and community level—exhibiting both an LGBT and queer ethos.

Class, inequality and community development: editorial introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mae Shaw ◽  
Marjorie Mayo
Keyword(s):  
Community Development ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Development Strategies ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Class Inequality ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Detailed Explanation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

In contexts across the world, community development is being rediscovered as a cost-effective intervention for dealing with the social consequences of global economic restructuring that has taken place over the last half century. This chapter introduces the term ‘community development’ and its plurality of meanings, as well as introducing the ways in which community development can be used to address inequality. The authors pose that class should be central to an analysis of inequality and the ways in which it is framed by community development strategies. The chapter then goes on to give a more detailed explanation of the terms ‘class’ ‘inequality’ and ‘community development’ and how they interplay with one another. The chapter concludes by giving a description of the layout of the remainder of the book.

scholarly journals Care and affective relations: Social justice and sociology

2020 ◽  
pp. 003802612095274
Author(s):  
Kathleen Lynch ◽  
Manolis Kalaitzake ◽  
Margaret Crean
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Egalitarian Theory ◽  
A Site ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Status Recognition ◽  
Affective Relations

This article examines the ways in which the care-indifferent and gendered character of much political egalitarian theory has contributed to a disregard for the care-relational dimensions of social injustice within the social sciences. It demonstrates how the lack of in-depth engagement with affective relations of love, care and solidarity has contributed to an underestimation of their pivotal role in generating injustices in the production of people in their humanity. While humans are political, economic and cultural beings, they are also what Tronto has termed homines curans. Yet, care, in its multiple manifestations, is treated as a kind of ‘cultural residual’, an area of human life that the dominant culture neglects, represses and cannot even recognize for its political salience. If sociology takes the issue of relational justice as seriously as it takes issues of redistribution, recognition and political representation, this would provide an intellectual avenue for advancing scholarship that recognizes that much of life is lived, and injustices are generated, outside the market, formal politics and public culture. A new sociology of affective care relations could enhance a normatively-led sociology of inequality, that is distinguishable from, but intersecting with, a sociology of inequality based on class (redistribution), status (recognition) and power (representation). It would also help change public discourse about politics by making affective in/justices visible intellectually and politically, and in so doing, identifying ways in which they could be a site of resistance to capitalist values and processes.

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