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Book Review: Allmer, Thomas. (2015). Critical Theory and Social Media: Between Emancipation and Commodification.
No full textIn past years, a number of writers – including Astra Taylor, Cory Doctorow, Howard Rheingold, Christian Fuchs, and others – have published important books about the dynamics of the social media. Yet, Thomas Allmer has managed to find a unique standpoint that provides his book with a much-deserved place in this somewhat cluttered research space. Based on a combination of in-depth theoretical inquiry and sound quantitative research, Critical Theory and Social Media addresses issues pertaining to theory and practice in equal depth – thus walking the walk of critical social praxis
Who Are We Smiling For? Three Contradictions of the Happiness and Wellbeing Agenda in Community Practice
Get PDFThis article is intended as a critical intervention into the happiness and wellbeing agenda in community practice. Although our reflections are influenced by the Scottish context they are not solely informed by it, since the rise of the happiness and wellbeing industry and its relationship to neoliberalism is clearly a phenomenon of wider relevance (e.g. Davies 2014; Ehrenreich 2009). As co-authors, our different starting points led us to a dialogue on the relationship between the rise of happiness and wellbeing discourse and the decline of critique. What emerged from this was the identification of three contradictions shaping the happiness and wellbeing agenda. We outline them here in the hope that it provides a framework to think through what is at stake for community workers with an interest in critical pedagogies
Building Resilience, the Role of Community Development?
Get PDFWithin the current context, the role of community development within the UK is increasingly circumscribed or directed by an array of inter-related Government policy objectives gaining currency within public debate. One such directive is the need to generate greater \u27Community Resilience\u27 (SCDC 2011:2). However what exactly is called for within this discourse is not always clear
Review: The Stigma of Poverty: Challenges, Interventions and Possibilities 29 September 2016
Get PDFThe event was sponsored by Scottish Green Party MSP Patrick Harvie, co-organised by the University of Liverpool, University of Leeds, the Social Policy Association and Poverty Alliance, and featured academics and professionals from each of the organisations, as well as both Glasgow Caledonian University and NHS Health Scotland. Following a brief explanation of the event format from or chair for the night, the University of Leeds’ Dr Kim Allen, Patrick opened proceedings by informing us that he had sponsored the night’s proceedings and arranged to host the event at Holyrood as he feels it essential that the Scottish public have access to what should be rights by their building. He stressed that it is only through public engagement alongside professionals, academics, and policymakers that Scotland can truly hope to make progress in challenging he root causes of and social stigma attached to poverty
Book Rerview: Carol Roy (2016) Documentary Film Festivals: Transformative Learning, Community Building and Solidarity
No full textDrawing on research into three Canadian Documentary Film Festivals, Carol Roy presents a compelling case for such festivals as conduits for social connectedness, solidarity, activism/action and hope. Ultimately, this book encourages us and inspires us to reflect on how our own educational practice can work in this way.
Resilience and Resistance on the Road to Recovery in Mental Health
Get PDFThis article explores the relationship between policy discourses framed around notions of resilience, the influence of the mental health user movement, and the institutionalisation of the recovery model in mental health programmes. This has particular relevance for community education practice. It argues that a spurious consensus has been constructed which conceals competing interests, contested meanings and contentious politics. It concludes by considering what hope there is for reclaiming recovery as a social and political practice which is capable of resisting those neoliberal austerity agendas through which it is currently constructed. Although it is written from the Scottish context, it will certainly have relevance elsewhere.
Book Review: Meade, R. & Dukelow, F. (2015). Defining Events: Power, Resistance and Identity in Twenty-First-Century Ireland,
No full textThis publication hooked me from the start with a wonderful, stimulating introduction. The book sets out to analyse and critique twenty-first-century Ireland while ‘consciously avoiding myth making and generalisation’. Examining a wide range of defining events, authors were encouraged to ‘take stock of contexts and contradictions’, ‘think ‘dialectically’’ and not ‘celebrate uncritically or damn unequivocally’. Useful discussions of the concepts of power, resistance and identity set the scene for the chapters to follow but also indicate where readers might expect contributing authors to vary in their understanding of these concepts or the emphases they bring to their analyses
A General Theory of Everything
Get PDFI am a member of a group of five people in their seventies. All of us were at some time in our lives employed by the Australian Trade Union Training Authority (TUTA). We are also all members of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). We meet and plot how we can reform the ALP. We exchange short papers or long emails, and we call ourselves "The Tilters" (after Cervantes). We also lunch well and drink (a lot of) wine. We meet at a harbourside rowing club [in Sydney] which has an adequate restaurant attached and a deck with views over the water. This is not irrelevant, comrades, because the scene helps create a climate conducive to learning (to quote the egregious Malcolm Knowles). We seek meetings with various MPs, Union leaders and academics, and we even think that we have seen a change in the discourse of the Leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party that we think comes from us. We have recently decided that there is a need for a new General Theory, and are tackling that challenge in, for example, this mini-paper in which I seek to replace capitalism, socialism and the rest of it
Austere Lives: Marginalised Women Gaining a ‘Voice’ in the Former Durham Coalfields
Get PDFThe role of women in former mining communities in County Durham has undergone significant changes since the time of the Miners’ Strike (1984-1985). The miners’ defeat was followed by the closure of the collieries and the redundancies of 50,000 men (Beynon et al, 1991, p.160), an event which radically changed family life as role reversal took place in the home when work disappeared for men. Cockburn (1977, p.179), a decade previously, had recognised that where deindustrialisation occurred ‘capital has actually defined the very shape of the family’. This was certainly the case in mining communities in County Durham
Possibilities of a Community Centred Pedagogy: A Snapshot of a Reading Project in Cape Town
Get PDFThis article traces shifts in radical pedagogy from the post-Apartheid period to the present (1994 to 2014) in the Programme for Research and Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA), an organisation that advocates a bilingual language policy in schools and presently runs a ‘reading for enjoyment’ campaign. Radical pedagogy is included in the paradigm of critical education as it challenges oppressive relations and takes the knowledge of the oppressed as its starting point. PRAESA’s starting point is that children learn and progress better if they first learn in their home language and then become literate in a second language