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Youth And Community Based Approaches to Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls: Reflections from India
Get PDFViolence against women is a worldwide yet still largely hidden problem. One in three women worldwide will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime’ (Walby, et al, 2017. 2). This matters. Violence wrecks lives (Ibid). But freedom from the threats of harassment and sexual assault are freedoms that so many women can hardly imagine, because violence is such a deep rooted aspect of so many cultures. These issues are becoming increasingly recognised for the social injustices and human rights violations that they are – and increasingly challenged. This has been especially so in India, following the national and indeed the international publicity that followed the horrific rape of a young woman in Delhi, in 2012. Although the victim subsequently died from her injuries, this was not before she had time to give evidence about the attack, and so to raise wider awareness of the urgent need for action in response
The ‘C’ Word Understanding the Context of Mental Distress
Get PDFWhy is context important? Because, without it, we fill in the blanks and arrive at erroneous conclusions. That is precisely what psychiatry has done with our distress. By second-guessing ‘scientific evidence’ that has so far proved elusive, they have sent us on a wild goose chase, diverting everyone’s attention from the causal factors that are right before our eyes. Instinctively we know this but it has suited us, as a society and as individuals, to ignore it and bow instead to the ‘expertise’ of those whose professional, financial and political motives we neglect to examine. This article attempts to redress the balance by speaking frankly from my experience of coming through the psychiatric system to emerge with a clearer understanding of the damage that is done by medicalising our distress
Vulnerable Practice: Why We Need Honest Conversations To Make Change
Get PDFAs practitioners who have been involved in work that draws on traditions of critical education in community settings, frustration, isolation, hope, and connection have been central emotions in our experiences. We feel frustrated by limited resources and the enormity of the task, isolated in the work we are doing and the conditions we are trying to do it in, and over whelmed by the devastating realities we see in and across communities. We also feel deeply connected to the communities we work alongside and we feel connection in the chance meetings with other like-minded/like-purposed people we meet. We feel sure that critical education is a necessary part of changing the intolerable – but we don’t feel sure about how to make critical education an effective and sustainable practice in the current context. So how do we find out? In this article we will argue that there is a need to build spaces and relationships that allow for more honest conversations and greater vulnerability about the challenges involved in doing critical education. We believe that these spaces and relationships need to be supportive and they need to connect dialogue with collective action. We will share with you a bit about CAMINA, a project which is trying to nurture such conversations and link them to action, but which also faces its own challenges in doing so.  
Community Engagement Two poems by Jo McFarlane
Get PDFAll my grassroots experience of community engagement has been as an activist – someone from within the community being ‘done to’, or ‘done for’ in some cases. My particular area of involvement is mental health activism. Having been a psychiatric patient for 27 years, I know only too well what it is like to be on the receiving end of power, and the culture of dependence that can come from that – where any scraps from the rich man’s table are welcome. So co-option, the process by which we become subsumed into the agenda of those in power in order to legitimate their policies and decisions, is a very real danger. As community workers supporting people to effect change, it is something you have to be particularly aware of, and to make explicit when you see it happening. Knowledge is power and to acquire that knowledge we have to retrace our steps and identify what went wrong and, most importantly, what we can learn from it. So that is what these poems are about
Review: Shaping the Future: A New Radical Learning Network
Get PDFOn Thursday 9th November 2017 I travelled through to the University of Glasgow for the Shaping The Future: A New Radical Learning Network launch and networking event. Hosted by Dave Beck, Lecturer in Community Development, and with a 3-hour running time, the event was pitched as ‘an opportunity to decide what we want to be as a network, what we can do together, and the ways we can get involved’. This article is a summary of the proceedings, along with a handful of my own reflections
Education Governance in Scotland: A Response
Get PDFA Review of the recent Scottish Governemt publication on education governance
Creating Space For Thinking Together
Get PDFThe purpose of this afternoon gathering was to celebrate the launch of Community Engagement: A Critical Guide for Practitioners. The event was well attended by a diverse group of practitioners, activists, academics and students, all bearing their own understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing contemporary community engagement, and all willing to listen to the thoughts and views of others. This Guide is a timely resource and makes an excellent contribution to the field of practice; it has the potential to play a major role in helping us unpack the challenge we face to foster the type of community engagement that can help us to address some of the inequalities within our communities. The Guide can be used in its entirety to encourage dialogue and discussion or as stand-alone sessions. As well as being a really useful resource for those working with community groups, it also challenges practitioners to bring a critical lens to the nature of their own practice
Community Engagement: A Critical Guide for Practitioners: Chapter 1: Thinking Politically
Get PDFWhen asked to write an introduction for one of the chapters in Community Engagement: A Critical Guide for Practioners it was the first chapter on ‘Thinking Politically’ that leapt out at me. Sometimes in the field of practice it can be easy to get caught up in having to react, often quickly, to the complex and contradictory forces that are at play within community education. Chapter One brought me back to key fundamental but political questions and issues in relation to Community Engagement that one should never lose sight of such as what is its purpose plus why and what is it funded for? As practitioners, it’s important to take time to draw on theoretical ideas and concepts in order to make some kind of sense of the dynamics and tensions that can exist between policies, politics, power, the people we work with and their lived experience, plus our own values and stances as workers
Community Engagement: A Critical Guide for Practitioners: Chapter 4: Making Educational Relationships
Get PDFAs practitioners, one of the seminal aspects of our work is establishing that all important relationship with those around us. It is the ubiquitous concept that facilitates meaningful work and, whether figuratively or literally, ensures the door is not shut in our face. In my opinion, it is the commitment and value placed on this relationship that unifies and under- writes all aspects of the community education field and in my role as a Family Support Worker cannot be down played. In this chapter, Jim Crowther and Mae Shaw highlight this dynamic, its tensions and the necessity for this relationship to be one of educational purpose