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Dark Pasts in the Landscape: : Statue Wars in Western Australia
Get PDFIn an era of reconciliation and truth-telling, many have questioned the symbolic power of statues. A storm of controversy across the globe galvanised an electric energy in which many statues were damaged or toppled. Statues became lightning rods for social conflict. This article explores earlier clashes over statues in Perth in the late 1970s and 1980s, revealing that while the statue of a colonial figure was untouchable despite the dark side of his history, the statue of an Aboriginal leader erected to recognise Western Australia’s First Peoples was decapitated. The article concludes with a discussion of methods for dealing with the dark history of these silent sentinels from the past
Undergraduate students’ perceptions of community engagement: A snapshot of a public research university in Canada
Get PDFStudents who participate in regular community engagement (CE) often experience benefits in different areas of their lives. Many academic institutions have implemented action plans to increase CE within the student population. At the University of Calgary, Canada, this is done primarily through its broader Eyes High strategy. As there remains a gap in the literature about students\u27 perceptions of CE and their awareness of university CE strategies, this study aims to identify undergraduate students’ awareness of the Eyes High strategy, attitudes towards and levels of engagement, and challenges and potential methods to increase CE participation. Data was collected through a voluntary online survey (n=528). Participants were recruited through posters, social media, online faculty platforms and by faculty members. Survey results indicated students lacked knowledge regarding the Eyes High strategy. It was noted that students’ knowledge, attitudes and practices of CE increased as they spent more time at the university. The top perceived challenges to CE were lack of time, accessible information, support and incentives. To increase accessibility and student participation, we suggest introducing the Eyes High Strategy and CE activities early to the undergraduate population through workshops, credit-based courses and/or professional development requirements. Our data suggests that students are not well informed about the Eyes High strategy. There is thus a need for the university to build a campus-wide, student-informed initiative to proactively engage students. This research will serve as a gateway to further explore communicative methods that might better convey university priorities to students
Enhancing youth participation in local governance: an assessment of urban and rural junior councils in Zimbabwe
Get PDFOver the years, youth participation in local decision-making across Africa has been minimal, despite the existence of enabling human rights frameworks on youth participation as well as institutions such as junior councils. This research aimed to compare the efficacy of Zimbabwe’s urban and rural junior councils in enhancing youth participation in local governance, which in turn would promote reform of the current participation frameworks, the realisation of children’s rights and ultimately productive community development. This paper is a product of qualitative research, combining desk research and key informant interviews with 22 council and ministry officials as well as eight focus group discussions with sitting and former junior councillors in Harare, Bulawayo, Bindura, Mutare, Masvingo, Rushinga, Makonde and Mbire. It was found that junior councils lacked adequate funding and technical support, resulting in tokenistic participation in local governance. Their legal status is unclear as both government ministries and local governments claim ownership. The research findings suggest that junior councils could be strengthened through the enactment of a specific legal framework to regulate their activities
Digital and Social Media Marketing - Growing Market Share for Construction SMEs
Get PDFThe construction industry has not been an early adopter of social media and digital marketing, due largely to lack of knowledge of and skills in these areas. Nevertheless, effectively deployed, digital and social media marketing can be a disruptive force allowing smaller residential construction companies to build brand awareness and win business from larger competitors. This study uses a qualitative approach - interviews with residential construction small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and adjacent industry actors - to obtain data addressing the key questions of the residential construction sector SMES\u27 digital marketing attitudes and capabilities; whether digital and social media marketing is as or more effective than traditional marketing strategies; and the challenges facing SMEs in making effective use of digital marketing strategies. The findings confirm widespread recognition of the value of digital marketing strategies among SMEs but reveal that uptake and effective use of digital marketing is undermined by deficiencies in external environment analysis and a lack of the investment and training needed to plan, monitor and maintain effective and up-to-date marketing mixes, strategies and objectives. Based on the findings, recommendations are offered for improving residential construction SMEs’ uptake and effective use of digital and social media marketing
Community Members as Facilitators: Reclaiming Community-Based Research as Inherently of the People
Get PDFThis article aims to rethink the positionality of community in community-based research collaboration and advocate the need for community members to facilitate CBR processes to counter power imbalances in community-university engagement. I reflect on my lived experience as a community-based facilitator through a feminist post-structural lens focused on the interplay between concepts such as subjectivity, margin-centre and performativity. I argue that, despite the community-engaged scholarship egalitarian ideal, university-community engagement still echoes the old researcher-researched binary in which academics remain the hegemonic pole. In addition, as a medium of power/knowledge, the university fabricates the community and its marginality. Thus, a margin-centre relationship is established, in which community groups must claim their marginality to receive a share of the centre (the university), such as research skills and information. In these margin-centre dynamics, university and community can be understood as identities and subject positions to be taken up by individuals. In essence, these positions are expressions of regulatory power that normalises subjectivities, a condition in which individuals exist as subjects in the social space. Insights from the work of Judith Butler lead to the understanding that, in order to conceive community members as CBR facilitators, normalised and stabilised binary identities (university-community) should be unsettled. This entails individuals who are subjected as ‘the community’ to escape subjection by moving towards recognition of a subjectivity that is not prescribed or is still marginalised within the discourse. In escaping subjection, community groups may exercise power in order to establish new power relations in which CBR becomes more community-led, yet still collaborative
\u27Midwife for Power\u27: Towards a Mujerista / Womanist Model of Community Organizing
Get PDFIn recent years, communities have responded to police violence in U.S. cities through confrontational models of community organising that evolved from patriarchal and male approaches. Very often, these approaches have not produced the hoped-for outcomes. In this article, I argue that a women-led community organising model, grounded in feminine relational power-with epistemologies, can lead to innovative policy changes, including in contexts of intractable problems, such as police misconduct. This article presents the Midwife for Power community organising model, which creates space for women organisers to nurture solidarity and creativity across all lines of difference, centres personal testimony and uses collective inquiry to create relational power to address injustice. Theoretically, this model draws on the rich insights of Black and Latina organisers and scholars, as well as traditions of intersectional solidarity. In order to illustrate the model, this article presents an empirical case study of a successful police accountability campaign
Decolonial Dreamers and Dead Elephants
Get PDFThe 11 articles in this special themed issue examine the complexity of issues of power between individual researchers, between researchers and community organisations or higher education institutions, and between community organisations and institutions in relation to community-engaged research and scholarship. The articles uplift the pain and joy in community-engaged research, the harm and the benefits, the contradictions and tensions, and the true gifts and understanding gained in research with communities for the purpose of co-creating transformational change. We weave our own knowledge and experiences together with these individual articles as we seek ways to reimagine the future of community research and engagement. Specifically, we connect the near obliteration of African elephants and loss of Indigneous ways of knowing in Africa with the diverse communities, contexts and issues of power in community-engaged scholarship represented in this special volume. We, like the authors, hold a dream for the future of engaged scholarship that is more equitable, inclusive and morally just. We believe this dream is not only possible but achievable, as evidenced by the work of the authors in this volume.
We present an African indigenous knowledge system, Ubuntu, whose principles, values and tenets simultaneously promote the conservation of the community as a whole and the harmonious existence of the individual within the community. We posit that the adaptation and adoption of this knowledge system within the scholarship and practice of community-university partnerships and community research relationships may enable the development of a mutuality and reciprocity that levels power hierarchies within the personal, organisational and societal arenas of community-university partnerships. We demonstrate that many of the cases described by contributors to this special volume resonate with this knowledge system, which itself has survived colonisation and its concomitant epistemicide. Together, the authors help paint a pathway for those who want to become decolonial dreamers (la paperson 2017) daring to reimagine the nature of power in research as we collectively find ways to dream bigger in order to uncover new and exciting possibilities for this work we call community-engaged scholarship
Elusive empowerment: characteristics of indirectly elected women chairpersons of district councils in Uttar Pradesh, India
Get PDFThe 73rd Amendment to the Constitution of India was introduced with a stated legislative intent of reserving not less than a third of seats for women in institutions of local self-government, the three-tier panchayati raj institutions. That amendment is considered a milestone in India’s project of empowerment of women. This paper evaluates the power and prestige of the post of an adhyaksha (chairperson) of a zila (district) panchayat (council) in general, and in particular the status of women elected to the post during 2016 in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Analysing the candidature, electoral success, electoral practices and subsequent functioning of zila panchayat adhyakshas (ZPAs), the authors argue that despite seats being reserved for women, no meaningful political empowerment of women has occurred in UP. The paper questions the efficacy of the indirect mode of election of ZPAs in bringing about empowerment of women, arguing that indirect elections enable powerful ruling elites to use women as proxies, subverting the legislative intent of the 73rd Amendment. The paper therefore proposes electoral reforms
Toppling the Past?: : Statues, Public Memory and the Afterlife of Empire in Contemporary New Zealand
Get PDFThis article explores some of the recent debates over statues, memorials and cultures of commemoration in New Zealand. These \u27statue wars\u27 are particularly focused on explorers, military men, colonial governors, and even Queen Victoria herself, figures who are seen as being deeply implicated in the production of the persistent inequalities and pain that has resulted from colonialism and empire. My analysis particularly focuses on the city of Tūranga/Gisborne, James Cook\u27s first landing place in New Zealand and a location where there has a sequence of heated debates over Cook\u27s legacies and a series of attacks on statues of the navigator. It explores three ways in which the city\u27s landscape of memory has been reshaped: the removal of a contentious 1969 statue, the creative redevelopment of a long-standing historic reserve, and the erection of a statue to a key Ngāti Oneone tupuna (ancestor). This discussion particularly highlights the work and arguments of the Ngāti Oneone historian and artist, Nick Tupara. The final section of the essay turns to the author\u27s own location - Ōtepoti/Dunedin - and offers a reading of debates over statues in that city, underlining the pivotal importance of indigenous perspectives on history and public space
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