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Scottish Community Empowerment: Reconfigured Localism or an Opportunity for Change?
Get PDFCommunity development and regeneration policy in Scotland employs aspirational language, depicting communities as the empowered drivers of economic and social change. It anticipates that willing, able and highly skilled community groups will come forward and assume responsibility for the delivery of local services. This narrative fails to account for the impacts of austerity, the complexities of empowerment (Skerratt and Steiner, 2013) or what will happen to communities who fail to be empowered. The article challenges the positive narrative employed in Scotland by highlighting issues that complicate the empowerment process. It concludes by suggesting ways in which a ‘Scottish Approach’ to policy making may help to create opportunities for empowerment policy in Scotland to better address the challenges, inequalities and complexities of empowerment
The Global Financial Crisis and Some Potential Solutions for Communities
Get PDFIn contemplation of the economic troubles faced by the last Labour Government, Tony Benn famously declared that the very scale of crisis was the \u27occasion for making the fundamental changes and not (the) excuse for postponing them\u27 (1989). So it is today. The real economic challenge is how to secure not just short-term economic management again, but long-term fundamental economic change
Community Engagement: A Critical Guide for Practitioners: Chapter 6: Defining the Problem - Framing the Solution
Get PDFCristina Asenjo introduces Chapter 6 of Community Engagement: A Critical Guide for Practitioners by
Jim Crowther and Mae Sha
Ruth Wodak (2015) The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean
Get PDFReview of Ruth Wodak (2015) The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mea
The Politics of Breastfeeding: In Whose Interests?
Get PDFAlthough breastfeeding is a natural physiological process that has sustained our existence for thousands of years, today mothers face a plethora of barriers that “make it difficult and sometimes impossible for women to breastfeed in the UK” (Unicef, 2018). These barriers include access to support, aggressive marketing of formula, lack of education, socio-economic barriers and mothers’ feelings of embarrassment (Ibid). On top of this, the politics of breastfeeding has become so complex that there are a myriad of cultural issues that those providing support to mothers have to navigate. Unicef believe we need an approach that recognises that, although mothers are the ones who will physically breastfeed, all of us can impact on breastfeeding. Therefore, if we are to try and solve the problem of breastfeeding we need to stop framing the issue as being the individual responsibility of mothers
Shaw, M. and Mayo, M. (Eds.) Class, Inequality and Community Development,
Get PDFShaw and Mayo’s book promotes the centrality of class analysis as a platform for liberatory community development. Recognising class-based, structural inequality is, in the editors’ view, basic to resisting and subverting a community development agenda that serves a retreating state and which tends to reach out charitably rather than transformatively, masking and reproducing structural inequalities in the process. The contributors to this volume build on this argument and provide case-studies which highlight the class-informed roadblocks to liberation and the tensions and possibilities generated by class-conscious, anti-neoliberal and counter-deficit approaches to community development. 
Feminism: A Fourth to be Reckoned With? Reviving Community Education Feminist Pedagogies in a Digital Age
Get PDFThe notion that feminism is in its ‘fourth wave’ is undoubtedly controversial and highly disputed amongst feminist circles (Munro, 2014). On one hand there remains a plethora of misinformation on the ‘death of feminism’ and a widespread common sense understanding of our indisputably ‘equal’ society (Faludi, 1993); on the other, a still active, strident movement fighting against such common misconceptions in order to achieve true freedom of rights and opportunities, regardless of sex and subsequent socially constructed gender (Redfern and Aune, 2013). In recent years there has been a noticeable resumption of feminist debate, discussion and activism due to the surge of digital spaces. This nurtures a new form of culture and expression in which global voices can be heard and changes made through the power of online platforms. Feminist thinkers are declaring this a new wave of feminist gusto, ‘the fourth wave’, in which the power of digital media is harnessed to tackle the gross inequalities prevalent in social, economic, and political domains. The enduring relevance of feminism irrefutably persists for, in the apt words of second-wave bumper stickers; ‘I’ll be a post-feminist in a post-patriarchy’ (Kavka, 2002 p29)
The Fairer Scotland Action Plan and Democracy
Get PDFIn 2016 the Scottish Government produced its Fairer Scotland Action Plan which built on a number of Fairer Scotland conversations. This response specifically addresses the Action Plan as it relates to furthering democratic life in Scotland, which was one of its primary objectives. During the process of consultation which led up to the action plan, ‘public involvement in democracy was one of the most talked about issues in the conversation. There was a call for local people to play a part in decisions that affect them and their communities.’ (p12) The other aspects to this demand for democratic change was in relation to how public services relate to people’s needs and access issues particularly for rural communities. Whilst it is good to see the Scottish Government engage in this type of constructive consultative exercise and follow it up with specific proposals the response to the ‘most talked about issue’ is woefully inadequate
Review: William Davies, (2016) The Happiness Industry
Get PDFWhilst doing fieldwork in Vientiane, Laos, for my PhD looking at the ways in which young people understand happiness, a young man made a throwaway comment to me that ‘you can’t measure a smile…well, you could but it wouldn’t mean anything’. I was catapulted back to this encounter the moment that I saw the cover for William Davies’s book The Happiness Industry which features a smile with a scale running along its length which is maybe a ruler, or maybe one of the seemingly ubiquitous survey questions that asks the respondent to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, their happiness
Resisting ‘human capital’ ideology?
Get PDFHuman capital was defined by Gary Becker (1975) as ‘any stock of knowledge or characteristics the worker has (either innate or acquired) that contributes to his or her productivity’. This knowledge was regarded as a form of capital because it was seen as enabling workers to invest in a set of marketable skills through gaining credentials that would enable them to increase their earnings. This commodification of human beings as a form of capital goods has been much criticised (e.g. Rubenson, 2015) but nevertheless has gained largely uncritical currency. It has been taken up by many international organisations, especially the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) as a key driver of adult learning because ‘for individuals, investment in human capital provides an economic return, increasing both employment rates and earnings’ (OECD, 2001:3). When applied to literacy learning, this model of knowledge claims a universal relationship with economic development, individual prosperity and vocational achievement and this in turn leads to an assumption that skills-focused education is the most important. This perspective, which regards countries and their citizens as competitors in a global market place, then gets translated into measurable indicators such as those used in the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) (OECD, 2016). These powerful standards become taken for granted in our everyday practices, meaning that the focus of education is on the national productivity agendas that are in the interests of industry rather than ordinary people (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). In addition the narrow domains of skills-focused knowledge perpetuated by these interests become accepted as normal and so are difficult to challenge (Gorur, 2014)